Anybody can make Mario, Nintendo’s world-famous little plumber, race through the Mushroom Kingdom, chasing coins. But what if Mario could do it on his own?

《超级马里奥》是任天堂游戏公司出品的世界级名作，任何人都可以控制水管工马里奥在蘑菇王国中跑着追逐硬币。不过，试想一下如果马里奥能自行完成这些任务会怎样？

That’s the goal of the Mario A.I. Project: to develop an artificially intelligent Mario agent that becomes aware of himself and his environment, making decisions about what to do based on spoken instructions.

这就是马里奥人工智能项目的目标：造出一个模拟智能的马里奥，他将拥有自我意识，能够感知周围的环境，并能根据语音指令决定如何行动。

Built by members of the Cognitive Modeling Group at Germany’s University of Tubingen, the Mario A.I. Project has released a video demonstrating and explaining the initiative. And while the team’s progress seems to be slow, it’s pretty cool to think of this most-famous of game characters having a will of his own.

这一项目由德国蒂宾根大学（University of Tubingen）的认知模型组成员研发，目前已发布了一段演示和解释视频。尽管项目进展看似缓慢，但想到马里奥这个超人气游戏角色将拥有自己的思维，还是非常酷的一件事。

Using Carnegie-Mellon’s Sphinx speech-recognition toolkit, the video’s narrator explains, Mario can understand a large number of English sentences and commands. Based on a huge logic and grammar tree the team built, he can answer things about what he knows based on what he’s been told and can take actions based on what he’s learned.

视频叙述者解释说，使用卡耐基梅隆大学（Carnegie-Mellon）的斯芬克斯语音识别工具包，马里奥能理解大量的英文句子和指令。基于研发团队构建的庞大的逻辑和语法树，马里奥能回答有关他被告知过的事情的问题，还能根据学到的知识采取行动。

He can even make decisions based on his emotions or his needs. For example, if Mario’s hungry, he’ll chase coins. If he’s just feeling curious, he’ll explore the Mushroom Kingdom, autonomously gathering knowledge about items he doesn’t know much about yet.

马里奥甚至能根据自己的情感和需要做出决定。例如，如果马里奥饿了，他就会追逐金币。如果他只是好奇，将会探索蘑菇王国，主动地积累知识，获取新知。

Vocabulary

plumber: 水管工

A.I. (artificial intelligence): 人工智能

cognitive: 认知的

toolkit: 工具包

curious: 好奇的

（译者：小霹雳 编辑：刘明）