Bored with your video game? Artificial intelligence could create new levels on the fly

Mario may be super, but even he must get bored hurdling the same Goombas and falling off the same cliffs over and over. Fortunately, a new artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm can endlessly produce new levels, and even tailor them to a player's skill level. Computer scientists have spent decades honing "procedural content generation," the use of algorithms to automatically design new characters, landscapes, and weapons for video games, saving humans hours of labor. But programmers still need to handcraft the rules that tell the computer how to create such content. In recent years they've applied machine learning, an AI technique by which computers learn from examples, so AI can simply produce more content in the style of existing content without needing explicit instructions.