AI Learns to Play Super Smash Bros 

Interesting. I'm a former competitive Melee/Project Melee player, and I think I might be able to help you understand why some of the behaviors were the way that they were here. I'm guessing the fact that you de-emphasized the actions associated with wave dashing meant that the AI didn't really learn how to jump. I'm also guessing that the reason your AI did so many smash attacks was because a lot of players use the C stick to do aerial attacks. The C stick is basically a macro for smash attack (up, down, left, right input with an associated A press). So my guess is that this is the reason why you see your AI standing at certain spots under the CPU spamming Smash attacks. It's probably trying to imitate the pro player's behavior of jumping at the CPU and doing an aerial, but you've basically told it never to jump because of wavedashing. Instead, it's skipping the jump input and going straight for the C stick. Alternatively, there's only different kinds of attacks on the ground (tilt versus smash) so a player would never need to do a non-smash attack in the air. If it's not taking C stick inputs as a reference, then it might just be seeing aerial attacks come out with the same inputs that a smash attack would come out on the ground and doing them that way. Either way, the AI sure seems to love doing smash attacks instead of aerials. xD

i loved that part where the AI said "its smashin' time" and smashed everyone in the room

8:03 As a Fox main i can confirm this gameplay is optimal

This part of the AI just jumping reminds of that old Copypasta of people saying that they let the bots in the Counter-Strike playing by themselves during the weekend and on Monday the person saw that the bots were not moving "as they discovered that if they did not fight no one would need to die" - Oh! The old time of the internet. All fake but still gold.

Some information that might help you: In terms of complex controller inputs, there is a controller called a “boxx” which is entirely analog, and keeps the important values mapped to a modifier (such as shield drops, up tilts, and forward tilts). There is also a way to turn a keyboard into a “boxx” style controller, with all the necessary inputs to play the game at a high level. Secondly, Slippi automatically saves all game replays unless specified otherwise, so top players probably have hundreds (if not thousands) of replays just sitting on their hard drives. Reaching out to them could be a good way of expanding your database by a large amount I’d love to watch a follow up video that aims to improve on the current model, so keep up the good work!

Great job! I can see you have a real passion for this stuff, keep it up!

I always thought it would be cool to have a learning AI start from scratch with a basic goal like get the opponent into the blast zone as fast as possible and see what it comes up with. Would it discover new tech? Would it learn to wavedash? Would it tech-chase? It would be a super useful learning tool, especially if you gave it human reaction time and input speed. But I can’t imagine how complicated and intensive that would be.

We now need to create a tournament where different AI's compete against each other. To make the best computer player.

Being a competitive smash player, this is super dope to see being done. I know nothing about machine learning, but I am curious if it would be possible to do an evolutionary style ai for melee where it's able to learn what to do in specific situations. Melee has many states of play in order to account for, you have neutral, advantage, punish and edge guarding for some examples. Each of those states have moves that are better for those specific situations. I wonder that since you tried to make an ai replicate a pro player, without the ai understanding the context of the move, it turned out the way it did. Maybe an evolutionary model might be able to learn the context of what moves are good in specific states of the game?

The “code bullet wannabe” bit really got me lol

"It didn't work, it just resorted to continuously jumping". I don't know man.... that sounds a lot like Melee Champion H-Box.

action vs self.action is the most relatable thing ever

Wow, fascinating! Awesome work dude :) (btw I really appreciate the additional information in the subtitles, it's highly appreciated. And they're not auto-generated so that's neat too)

Nice job man, I got this from my recommended. Hope your channel blows up!

I have been thinking about this idea for a while so i am glad to see you gave this a try.

As a Statistics and Data Science major, it’s interesting to see a well explained crossover between my fav game,Smash, and my fav field DL/ML!!

your videos will only get better!! keep up the consistency

"That would take 83 days. I don't have that time." Also: "3 months of work down the drain."

incredibly underrated video and channel, you’ve earned my subscription. i hope you keep up the brilliant content :)

I think this video is awesome and I love everything about it and think the channel is cool! I think you defo have room to grow content creation wise but you have my subscription broski :)

4:52 that's me! Cool video!

Honestly super well done! Def a sub these concepts are super cool

dude this is actually so sick. you might get this same comment a lot here (and also you might already know this) but you should consider looking into slippi if you're interested in ever doing more ai stuff for this game in the future from the actual community. slippi offers the ability to play online with other real players so it would be interesting to see how the ai fares against actual players online. there's a discord too where a lot of people are working on ai for melee and machine learning for stats and all that. melee is my favorite game and i'm so happy you've joined this community and learned to love our game. thanks for making this video man this is awesome

You said the Fox could only perform one move, but he was clearly using shine into fire Fox each time lol

Lol that bug spiral is so relatable. Cheers for not giving up dude, cool vid!

Dude! You should have way more than 800 subs! Keep up the fantastic work!

this vid has to blow up, great dedication

If you intend to do a sequel to this, I think it would be a good idea to make the control stick inputs more discrete and give it more options in terms of angle and whatnot. I think that you should do it as a polar coordinate instead of x/y like the controller output does. Sticking with your number system, you could make it so that angle is determined with 1-12, and distance from center 1-3, letting it do tilts and angles while keeping overhead simple. It should be somewhat easy to convert the training data from xy to polar

This is why we are supercomputers, just think about the power it takes to 'adapt'

I've just gotten into SSBM content recently so not sure if that's why the algorithm blessed me with this awesome video, but I loved it! Great stuff Code Bullet Wanna Be :)

This is really cool, subbed

He is perfectly crouch canceling ( crouching just before getting hit negate recoil to and hit stun) thats insane

"It didn't work, it just resorted to continuously jumping (on the top ledge)" Oh no, its working, its solved the game

For a second at thought you said "their philosophies", which probably would be very effective against the falcos

This brings back memories of playing melee with my friends (all older than me) and one was really good until a new challenger appeared that was just as good but also competed in world tournaments. Playing against those two and the other friend (who really liked to use heavy characters compared to fox and Falco for the other two) really helped me get pretty good. I mained Link btw, it was the only character versatile enough to compete with a heavy tank and two fast speed demons.

Love the content, hope youtube recommends this to more people.

I’ve been waiting for this. With Slippi replays you should be able to make AI versions of Top players. That would be sick

Funny Code Bullet reference, way to take advantage of his poor deprived audience, including me 😅 I'll subscribe for that

The way i would do this is i would first bind all the controls to something the ai could interact with. then, i would make a reward system that positively rewards dealing damage, taking a stock, combos, and character specific options like using super armor or a reflector, and negatively reward taking damage, having its sheild broken, being off stage, and losing a stock. then i would program more niche things such as how to utilize platforms or the ledge. this may eventually cause the ai to become campy and wait for time, so to prevent this, ill make it so if it goes to time with even stocks or a stock deficit, it loses all points if it results in a loss.

When all of the reinforcement learning just amounted to the agent jumping I COULD RELATE.

how some people can make a science of a 20 year old nintendo game. Lets look 20 years in the future, you see me visiting a master class at the ai Professor online University about quake champions and its philosophy.

Plays just like a little brother would. Spamming one attack

High quality! Keep it up

I’ve done some AI courses over college, not an expert, but I have a general idea of how things go with this. I recommend looking into the programming behind amiibos used for smash ultimate and see if you are able to generate a good idea on how to implement something similar to melee. It’s hard to copy player input when every player does a move differently. You could maybe set a parameter for wave dashes also. Teach the Ai how to do a wave dash and then if it reads the input close enough from the pro player, it will do that wave dash that it knows. Same can go for the rest of the tech in the game. Good stuff regardless! I would be excited to see a series on this. Weekly updates or monthly updates would be sick.

me who knows nothing about computers watching this: "Just show me the robot beating mango"

Would be interesting if it had relatively human limits, so it wasn't just a terminator and it felt like someone holding a controller. So like a built-in delay to mimic a fast human reaction time (0.05-0.1 seconds?), and a restriction on certain input sequences that would be physically impossible. Being visual-only would be super cool as someone already made a bot that reads and reacts to game data instantaneously, and it just absolutely slays in the most unfair ways possible. ...perhaps a mistake percent that increases with every input, that when triggered decreases and does something knowingly erroneous like holding the stick too hard or missing an input...

Have you considered using the replays to train a relatively small model to predict what inputs are being pressed for a given frame? This model could then generate the inputs for an unlabeled smash video meaning you could use all smash videos from RU-vid as part of the training data for the main model. OpenAI did this for their Minecraft playing model.

This was interesting even though i couldnt understand most of the technical details

off topic, but the sync between your words and your avatar's mouth movement is fucking nuts. great video. edit from the future: just saw the ai lip sync video and after seeing that its somehow made even more impressive.

I also created a melee bot for a class project, but it only learned how to jump over lasers or spam smash attacks. For my project I tried learning from a window of (states, actions) -> next action with rnns

Hi, your video inspired me to try something similar but for smash ultimate. Do you know if there is a library to get the position, speed ect. for ultimate, like there is for melee?

as a web developer the pain and suffering this project may have provoke in you, is beyond my human comprehension

Why is this so much work for 500 subs, bro this is incredible

I love that the Ai just uses alot of smash attacks.

great video, one question (sry if you already answered) but do you know if the ai uses DI when it gets hit?

Great video! I'm not going to say much here but this probably would've benefited from training the ai against itself, either way you earned a sub :D

Btw there is a smashbot ai, and it has competed against pro player and has won!

"you codebullet wannabe" DAMN THE SELF ROAST

The return of the king 👑

Very interested in doing a similar project. I’m familiar with CE, and neural nets. Would love to dive into how you went about this further if you have a chance.

Im trying to figure out how to make a bot thats good at dbfz. Besides having a lot of modding experience in my early 20s with Fo4 and Skyrim, I'm totally new to programming. This is an inspiring example of what I'm shooting for.

Thank you algorithm! Really cool idea! I would love to see more!

You have a very charismatic personality and this video was really engaging I'm sure you'll blow up soon enough, I think you need to work on the unscripted portions though, you give a much more introverted vibe near the end which makes it a bit harder to stay engaged along with the person you're commentating with being too energetic in a way that feels off especially since he's sometimes just saying things to say them even when he doesn't really get what's going on. All in all its a good video though

Then he found out about Slippi replays... Or maybe he hasn't. That'll help with this process a lot.

my man coded a fucking Amiibo.

This AI plays like it really wants to be little Mac 😆. Fr tho this is super impressive, great job!

Maybe try to incorporate advantage:disadvantage odds, like with stage control, to help the bot better guide itself to exploring good strategies

Hahaha Mistakes like that are why I spend twice as long on projects. I once thought a 5 was an S for my table name in SQL terminal and was wondering for hrs what was wrong with my tables. Good video, hope to work with & learn more from you. :)

i did this same thing with brawl for a school project in 8th grade, cool to see someone else try to do it in a different way

Great video! Now I see why it took so long.

If you do more nintendo/smash content, you’ll see a lot more traffic for sure. This video’s going to 10k+ views quick

Watching the AI try to wavedash was cute lol. It looked like when a human is first learning

ai training is just like ringing a million pavlov bells

Loved the code bullet joke

Slippi replay files would have probably made training the model much easier

criminally undersubbed channel

As a thought, what if you ignored actions, and instead trained it to produce raw controller inputs? Stick inputs would just be taking output from the NN, buttons would be done using a threshold.

Hi cool project. If I was doing this, I would get a large set of pro games, use the character positions and state (ie are they on the ground, in hit stun, in landing lag, %damage etc.), and controller inputs, as input to the neural net, and the result of the stock as output. Then I could potentially get a training sample for each frame of each game, although just taking samples when there's player input would be better. You could get hundreds of samples per game across 100s (preferably 1000s) of games. Then the net would learn the likelyhood of the result of each given stock, given the current state and any potential controller inputs, and choose the controller inputs most likely to result in winning the stock.

hey a good idea may be to train an ai on a box player so it only has a limited set of analog values to work with

bro. this is genius!

7:23 I feel your sufering

What about classifying different actions together (certain characters bread and butter combos or wave dashing) and assigning them good or bad values depending on opponent location in proximity to a zone around the AI and the opponents percentage (like a likelihood to hit/kill) I don’t know though I don’t really have any experience with anything like AI and it still sounds like it would only work with set characters

You created an amiibo for melee

Pero si al final lees la memoria, ¿qué diferencia hay con el propio bot del juego?

This is too underrated

I don't know a whole lot about neural networks but after seeing that they can be used to create something as impressive as dalle I was wondering when someone would attempt this. I commend you for the attempt. I love smash and having better bots would be helpful for practice.

I wish you'd given it a slightly higher reward for killing after taunting XD

I would love to see a follow up video.

an ai that inputs rest whenever it would land would be insane

Now verse it against an amiibo

I love the hours of work, the computer science and all the programming needed, and plays at your 10 year old brother level lol

How We Discover? 🤷🏻‍♀️

0:30 That isn't Super Smash Bros Melee's theme, that Super Smash Bros Brawl's theme

wow. all that expertise and that was the big

AI learns how to play smash bros CPUs: Am I a joke to you?

One thing that people who make smash AIs never know about (and, to be fair, literally idk how you would know about this unless you’re very familiar with top players haha) are issues with controllers. There are a lot of minor shitty things that exist in the game’s code that massively impact gameplay that are actually dependent based on the mechanisms of your specific controller. The major MAJOR issue is that most serious players play with UCF (universal controller fix) which fixes some of these issues… but then if you try and train an AI based on those inputs into vanilla melee, then they may not work the same (you can run into a similar issue if someone mods custom controls, such as removing tap jump). The other thing though is I have no clue how this impacts what an AI does… as in, I have absolutely no clue if those same controller issues would apply to a created AI. A bad controller, for example, might have a ~40% chance to successfully dashback even when executing the exact same inputs. If an AI tries to replicate that, do they also have the same odds? But also, if training off of someone with a bad controller, they’re less likely to try and dashback even when it may be the optimal option… Idk, all I’m saying is that anyone very serious about AIs playing smash REALLY needs to look into the controller as a potential barrier (or variable) too…

I love your videos how old are you because you have a amazing understanding of ia

nice video! :D

Someone has already made an AI for Melee but it can beat pro players.

no idea who you are but now im subbed