Doom and Super Mario could be a lot tougher now AI is building levels

AI researchers do love their games and two papers have shown that they can use general adversarial networks (GANs) to make old favorites a lot more interesting. In two separate papers, AI researchers built general adversarial networks to construct new video game levels for Super Mario Bros, a popular platform game controlling a mustachioed man in red overalls to collect coins and avoid enemies to reach a princess, and DOOM, the classic first person shooter from the early 1990s. GANs were first introduced in 2014. The system is made up of two networks: a generator and a discriminator. The generator creates fake samples of training data, and a discriminator tries to determine if the samples are real or fake. Both networks spar with one another, and over time the generator learns to forge more realistic samples to trick the discriminator.