Get Rhythm: How Beat Sage Uses AI To Create Beat Saber Maps

Late last month, Chris Donahue and Abhay Agarwal launched an impressive new tool called'Beat Sage', which uses artificial intelligence and neural networks to automatically generate custom Beat Saber maps from any song in seconds. We tried it out, and were left suitably impressed -- the resulting tracks are fun, challenging and better than many other auto-map generators for rhythm games. With the tool still in active development, we reached out to Donahue and Agarwal to get a better understanding of what makes Beat Sage tick and how it might be improved in the future. "I first tried Beat Saber in December 2019 and loved it immediately," Donahue, an AI researcher at Stanford University, explained in an email. A month later, in January 2020, he began intermittent work on what would become Beat Sage and spoke to Agarwal, who runs an AI design firm called Polytopal and agreed to help out.