Fish vs. Fish in Street Fighter II

http://www.twitch.tv/fishplaystreetfighter

by cyberfart • 12 years ago

372 69 12 years ago

dang• 12 years ago

Url changed from http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/20/7000-people-are-watching-tw..., which points to http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/20/6048973/fish-vs-fish-stree..., which points to this.

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

Background: This is the logical conclusion of Fish Plays Pokemon (http://motherboard.vice.com/read/an-exclusive-interview-with...), which was a hackathon project and a play on Twitch Plays Pokemon.

oneweirdtrick• 12 years ago

I believe this is actually the logical conclusion of the Internet.

prawn2• 12 years ago

There is no chance of that. The internet never ceases to amaze...

pimlottc• 12 years ago

Nah, that would involve cats playing video games.

orik• 12 years ago

I don't understand what you mean by "this is the logical conclusion of..."

What was concluded? Why is it logical?

Orangeair• 12 years ago

'Logical extension' would have been a better phrase, I think. And 'logical' is clearly tongue-in-cheek.

tormeh• 12 years ago

Can the fish see the game? What if the fish were rewarded for winning? Can we train fish to play street fighter? How about rats?

jerf• 12 years ago

I was just speculating to my coworker about tying breeding to winning...

hcarvalhoalves• 12 years ago

Can we train fish to play street fighter?

Certainly. The question is how well it would play.

kevinschumacher• 12 years ago

What I think would be more interesting would be a way for viewers to stimulate the fish.

Say you have a link that charges the viewer a small fee to feed the fish on a certain side of the tank. Scale the price with how much food the fish has been given (all the way down to $0.00 and up exponentially to not overfeed the fish). Basically, let the internet handle feeding your fish.

So they can watch it play street fighter.

And you make money off of it.

wdewind• 12 years ago

I don't think this is a possibility. While you could get some sort of feedback loop going (fish gets hit it gets shocked, fish hits it gets food or something), there would be no way for the fish to understand the massive amount of information they'd need to grok from the game, so they'd just be getting all this random stimuli with nothing to attach it to.

I can't see anyway to bridge the gap of making the fish understand the stimuli in relation to what's going on in the game. I would imagine the same is true for rats.

jpatokal• 12 years ago

The fish doesn't need to grok the entire game, it just has to be better than the other fish. (Cue that joke about two people being chased by a bear and one pausing to put on his sneakers. "What are you doing? You can't outrun a bear!" "I don't have to, I just have to outrun you!")

For example, if fish A realizes that swimming around corner X gets it food, because X happens to correspond to "move forward and punch", that's enough to win the game if fish B doesn't figure out the same.

brador• 12 years ago

We could use crows or pigeons. Smarter, and already well studied. Or rats.

w-ll• 12 years ago

Well given that its Street Fighter my best strategy was to always just mash random buttons.

I do wonder if he choose the fish at random or tried to find more active fishies.

coldcode• 12 years ago

I wonder now if one could train chimpanzees to play the game successfully.

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

I'm sure if you get an infinite amount of monkeys, they'd perform a Hadouken eventually.

pinkyand• 12 years ago

Yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkuO-8hfGhM

alceufc• 12 years ago

Nice, but I think it is not real, just marketing for the new Planet of the Apes movies.

spiritplumber• 12 years ago

what's missing from "fish plays game" is some sort of reward for the fish. I wonder how clever they can get.

SchizoDuckie• 12 years ago

And as a finishing touch, man made 2 fish fight eachother on Street Fighter and streamed it to the world in real time.

God I love the internet :D

eklavya3• 12 years ago

I don't get it, can someone please tell what is going on?

michaelmior• 12 years ago

The position of two fish in a tank are tracked. The tank is divided into a grid and the position of the fish in the grid determines the input into the game.

eklavya3• 12 years ago

ooh cool :P

Thanks :)

prawn2• 12 years ago

The description is further down the page. The top-middle sector of the tank activates the jump button for example. If both fish are in that sector, then the two characters will do nothing but jump on the spot until either fish moves elsewhere.

eklavya3• 12 years ago

I watched the video and couldn't figure out what was going on :D

Thanks :)

Eiriksmal• 12 years ago

Soooooo much more engaging than the Fish Plays Pokemon the creator links to. I explained it to a coworker (...in marketing) and couldn't help but giggle at every other sentence in my explanation. "So the fish swim around in that virtual grid, see, and that triggers button presses in the fighting game." Sweet action, as the kids say.

sagnew• 12 years ago

Haha this is awesome! First a couple of HackNY fellows make Fish Plays Pokemon, now this! I can't wait for what fish related fun comes next.

goshx• 12 years ago

Fish playing 2048 would be my guess

joshuacc• 12 years ago

Fish playing Flappy 2048 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7431047

nsxwolf• 12 years ago

A lot of engineering effort to watch Balrog jab and Blanka duck forever.

Fish are bad at playing Street Fighter II. I already intuitively knew this.

sharkweek• 12 years ago

Watching them for a bit, I would say they're ~=> my mom playing Street Fighter - the occasional times she would play video games with me, the results of her play often looked like this.

Fish > My mom at video games? Perhaps.

Scuds• 12 years ago

Maybe they should have been using fighting fish?

gzur• 12 years ago

I thought I was going to see Phil Fish fight himself, somehow.

hnal943• 12 years ago

That already exists, it's called Indie Game: The Movie.

stan_rogers• 12 years ago

Or one Phil Fish fighting another (Abe Vigoda's Barney Miller character). Now that'd be hilarious.

kevin_thibedeau• 12 years ago

He needs to randomize the 1P/2P assignment because Aquarius seems to prefer being on the right side of the tank and gets an unfair advantage as 1P.

ngokevin• 12 years ago

Maybe Aquarius prefers the right side because Aquarius likes to win.

grej• 12 years ago

If I could upvote you 10 times for the most ridiculously useless (but cool) thing I've seen on HN, I would. You win HN for today sir.

Natsu3• 12 years ago

Hypnotic. Aquarius can't seem to lose.

bluetidepro• 12 years ago

He is a winning machine. His gold color suits him well. Aquarius is an impeccable fighter.

Natsu3• 12 years ago

The last ~10 or so matches I've seen show Aquarius winning, often by a tiny margin. These fish might be more skilled than some real players.

They should make it so that you can play vs. a fish now.

EDIT: I spoke too soon, the Bruce is making a comeback.

andersthue• 12 years ago

This is the answer to life, the univers and everything!

louhike• 12 years ago

These fishes are more entertaining than the Pokemon game which was played through the chat room.

antidamage• 12 years ago

I was actually hoping for a writeup on the differences between regular fish and fish in SFII, but this is also good.

Next we need kittens versus fish. Kittens are much more active.

aaronm142• 12 years ago

Anyone know if these guys making these games are using some kind of library for the image processing or what? Seems pretty complicated to do

ddorian43• 12 years ago

maybe opencv ?

Shrugs• 12 years ago

I can confirm that FishPlaysPokemon uses OpenCV. There's a wealth of knowledge and tutorials, so if you just want to isolate certain color ranges (what they're doing), I guarantee there are tons of resources. There's also Python bindings to make things even more friendly. After that, it's some simple math to figure out which quadrant it's in and then trigger the correct button press.

aaronm142• 12 years ago

Hm, good call, thanks for that. Looks like there's a binding for Nodejs out there too: https://github.com/peterbraden/node-opencv

Natsu3• 12 years ago

Actually they just have to detect more than $x pixels of $color in each region then do a button press on that. I don't think in the abstract that it's all that complex, given that the fish are of starkly different colors that do not occur in the tank or elsewhere in the video feed.

tinco• 12 years ago

Stream seems to be down, here's what was on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHrRksz-XLI

Magi6042• 12 years ago

If you like to watch computer-controlled 2d fighting characters with actual decent AI (most of the time) squaring off against each other, check out http://www.saltybet.com/ .

There are over 5000 characters in the database, and it runs 24 hours a day. The matches can get really amusing sometimes.

IWillScoop• 12 years ago

It really is amazing, I still wonder how Salty made it.

Also some protips to those who are interested:

1) Always bet DBZ

2) Never trust chat

3) Never bet DBZ

Magi6042• 12 years ago

From a technical standpoint it doesn't seem too hard to set everything up (over time), but the concept and then the monetization of it is pretty ingenious.

I've seen Salty himself in the chat every now and then. I wonder how much time he spends working on the site vs how much he makes off of it every month.

michaelbuckbee• 12 years ago

Even better are the automated betting apps - betting on the automated gaming matchups.

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/automa...

downandout• 12 years ago

Somebody should setup a Bitcoin based side-betting operation for Saltybet...I'm guessing people would actually bet.

level09• 12 years ago

Humans are pattern recognition animals, we like to look at anything random and extract meaningful patterns from it.

I see this game as a clear example of that, where (random) fish movement is fed to a computer game and translated into game play (pattern). I fail though to conclude anything particularly interesting if one fish won the game :)

lowlevel• 12 years ago

This is best thing I've seen all year.

zeeshanm• 12 years ago

Would be interesting to observe if there may happen to be some pattern in fish movements as more data is collected over time.

pawn• 12 years ago

I had a dream one time when I was a kid that I trained a puppy to play Street Fighter 2. I'd never imagine it would ever be linked to anything this close to reality.

thestonefox• 12 years ago

what about the parody of http://twitch.tv/garlicplays

golergka• 12 years ago

What I'd really want to see is two monkeys playing the game against each other for the treat. If given some time, I believe that they can get better than most humans.

amatera• 12 years ago

If one of the fish managed to make an Hadoken it should get a job at Konami (or at least a nice place on an "Konami"-Desk)

codr• 12 years ago

Just gotta say this is a strange outcome of our technological developments.. I mean think of the energy that was spent making this work - it could've been done doing something.. I dunno fucking useful?!

It's almost as bad as watching two "grown-ups" play Street Fighter lol.

mhurron• 12 years ago

What have you done to benefit the world?

serf• 12 years ago

this exercise is useful.

1) the creators had a chance to learn/practice their favorite libraries and languages -- computer vision is hugely useful and applicable to nearly all domains.

2) the creators got spectators to think about the technologies involved, possibly motivating some to learn about them, and undoubtedly teaching a few people about things they didn't know the concepts behind. (computer vision. hell, check the comments on HN, a few of us didn't know how it worked and were thus elucidated.)

Fish vs. Fish in Street Fighter II

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