A fly brain, playing Super Mario

“I trained the fly to play Super Mario” is the entire caption, and it is doing a lot of work. Pietro Schirano is not posting a high score. He is posting a player: a simulated fly brain, dropped into a game people already know how to watch.

Mario is a useful arena because the audience can tell competence from thrashing without a chart. A jump that meets a gap, a run that dies on the first Goomba, a weird policy that somehow proceeds — you can see it. The simulation is the unfamiliar part. The game is the legend on the graph.

It is worth featuring as a behavior, not as a port. The famous game stays Nintendo’s. The new thing is who, or what, is holding the controller.