Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data

Summary

Finite Atari Machine Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data TL;DR, here’s the GitHub repo This project generated around 30 Billion individual 4kB files of random data. These files were winnowed down to about 10,000 through some heuristics gleaned from the complete collection of Atari ROM files. Finally, a classifier system scanned them using an Atari 2600 emulator to see if any of these random files were actually an Atari game. This project answers a question no one asked, no one wanted, and is a massive waste of resources: What if I shove a billion monkeys in a GPU and asked them to write a game for the Atari 2600? 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. This is about exploring something unimaginably vast and seeing if anything weird falls out. Results First Because no one reads below the fold, here’s an interactive emulator showcasing the most interesting Atari ROMs discovered. There’s no genetic algorithm here; just billions of random files run through an emulator. These are the best of the weird: WARNING: turn your volume down. There’s a bug in EmulatorJS. Problem Scope Assume each Atari 2600 cartridge is a 4 kilobyte chunk of data. It’s a maximum of 4096 bytes, or 32,768 bits. That means there are $2^{32768}$ possible ROMs. For perspective: That’s $10^{10159}$ potential Atari games. There are about $10^{20}$ grains of sand on Earth. And roughly $10^{80}$ protons in the visible universe. If you turned an entire datacenter of AI compute boxes onto this problem, it would likely take years before anything interesting was found. But with a little bit of smarts and actually reading a datasheet, the problem set is massively reduced. The basic search path to finding a ‘random’ Atari game would be to: Generate a ROM, by dumping 4kB of data from /dev/random into a file. Ru...