Teaching a computer to play Mario… seemingly through voodoo

computer-learning-mario

Some people know [Tom Murphy] as [Dr. Tom Murphy VII Ph.D.] and this hack makes it obvious that he earned those accolades. He decided to see if he could teach a computer to win at Super Mario Bros. But he went about it in a way that we’d bet is different that 99.9% of readers would first think of. … Read the rest

Have a baby? Build another one!

Ever since his daughter was born, [Markus] has been keeping logs full of observations of human behavior. Despite how it sounds, this sort of occurrence isn’t terribly odd; the field of developmental psychology is filled with research of this sort. It’s what [Markus] is doing with this data that makes his project unique. He’s attempting to use stochastic learning to Read the rest

Stiltwalker beat audio reCAPTCHA

This talk from the 2012 LayerOne conference outlines how the team build Stiltwalker, a package that could beat audio reCAPTCHA. We’re all familiar with the obscured images of words that need to be typed in order to confirm that you’re human (in fact, there’s a cat and mouse game to crack that visual version). But you may not … Read the rest

Hackaday Links: April 7, 2012

Need some gears? Got a timing belt?

[filespace] sent in a neat build he stumbled upon: making gears with plywood and a timing belt. Just cut out a plywood disk and glue on a section of timing belt. There’s some math involved in getting all the teeth evenly placed around the perimeter, but nothing too bad. Also useful for … Read the rest

Neural networks control a toy car

After taking the Stanford Machine Learning class offered over the Internet last year, [David Singleton] thought he could build something really cool. We have to admit that he nailed it with his neural network controlled car. There’s not much to the build; it’s just an Android phone, an Arduino and a toy car. The machine learning part of this … Read the rest