This has been quite an interesting series of Youtube videos. Allow me to explain:
It started off with a Fark article lovingly entitled Guy creates an artificial intelligence that learns how to play and beat a Super Mario Bros. level, of which the guy was the one and only Sethbling. Sethbling has been an amazing staple in the Minecraft community, and previously unknown to me is also a Super Mario Brothers speed runner.
He explains MarI/O (Mar + I/O, for those keeping up), in which he uses an emulator, some LUA, and a method of artificial intelligence to play and finish the first level of Super Mario Brothers.
The actual article from the University of Texas and the subsequently linked Wikipedia Pages (Neuroevolution, Evolutionary Algorithm, and Artificial Neural Network) are excellent readings.
This led me to the Credits Warp method. For speed runners, their goal is to finish the game as soon as possible, and with the Credits Warp this method is now the fastest.
The whole “Credits Warp” got me thinking about how this was actually done, so I found an amazing explanatory video on this specifically.
Rewriting a SNES using the console controller sounded amazing, and led to the next video on the list from tasvideos (the explanation) and the tasvideo where arbitrary code was executed for an amazing result (Starts at 32:00):
So, now i’m chilling with an amazing TAS execution of Super Mario World being fully run, and it’s pretty cool to see how people could just let computers do their thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Y2voAvVz4