From Zero to Flagpole Hero

How I went from a reinforcement learning novice to writing an AI from scratch that beat World 1–1 in New Super Mario Bros. in the span of two weeks.

Robert Clark
Towards Data Science
12 min readSep 8, 2019

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Can computers learn to control the famous Italian plumber?

You can’t spell Mario without I/O

Two weeks ago, I was a complete newbie to reinforcement learning. I’m not talking “you…

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Software engineer passionate about sports and artificial intelligence and, apparently, a blogger by night.