Anybody can make Mario, Nintendo’s world-famous little plumber¹, 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 Cognitive² 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 logic³ 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, autonomously⁴ gathering⁵ 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。