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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

Researchers want to use Mega Man 2 to evaluate AI:

Games have long served as a training ground for AI algorithms, and not without good reason. Games — particularly video games — provide challenging environments against which to benchmark autonomous systems. In 2013, a team of researchers introduced the Arcade Learning Environment, a collection of over 55 Atari 2600 games designed to test a broad range of AI techniques. More recently, San Francisco research firm OpenAI detailed Procgen Benchmark, a set of 16 virtual worlds that measure how quickly models learn generalizable skills.

The next frontier might be Mega Man, if an international team of researchers have their way. In a newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org, they propose EvoMan, a game-playing competition based on the eight boss fights in Capcom's cult classic Mega Man 2. As they describe it, competitors' goal is to train an AI agent to defeat every enemy and evaluate their performances by common metrics.

Fabricio Olivetti de Franca, Denis Fantinato, Karine Miras, A.E. Eiben, Patricia Vargas, EvoMan: Game-playing Competition, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.10445.pdf

Original Submission