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Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

Discovering Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

Thanks to advances in GPUs, AI, and machine learning, we can now (very quickly) write a Python script that dumps garbage into 4KB ROMs and asks, “does this look like a game?” This isn’t nostalgia, because my first console was an NES. It’s dead simple, there are no memory mappers or program and character ROMs, and it doesn’t have the ‘Nintendo Logo copy protection’ the original Game Boy has. Imagine GPUs across the world mining entropy for Atari games, then sending the promising ones to a central system to evaluate their ‘game-ness’.

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