Why Can a Machine Beat Mario but Not Pokemon?

This was simple menu driven early Final Fantasy style game on rails.

So, some basic path finding and press X near stuff would be useful. But, it did not need to react to enemies, or have complex environments like Zelda games do. On the other hand, the meaning of all those random text blurbs was rather critical.

What's the hidden data in blackjack? All the cards are face up except the one dealer card.

doesn't life actually count as training? :) and it's a LOT of training, isn't it?

While Pokémon might have a higher branching factor than Mario, I don't think that means a "machine can't beat it". First, I'm going to use Gen I/II (Red/Blue/Yellow // Gold/Silver/Crystal) here as "Pokémon", the game, as I am most familiar with them; I am not particular aware if the formula has changed in more recent generations.

> Pokemon is an open world game

… not really. While you can walk around, sure, the actual game is mostly linear; the order in which you explore and visit towns is mostly predetermined. (It has to be, as the Pokémon and trainers you encounter become more and more powerful, so have to progress with that.) Most of the "branches" that occur while walking around any given part of the map will all coalesce on one of the entrances/exits to that part of the map. (I.e., either you leave the town, or you visit one of the buildings in the town, or you talk to someone in the town. Mostly, that's it; my point here is that one can simplify all the "standing at coordinate X, coordinate X+1, ... etc. greatly; those positions are essentially equivalent.)

As for a goal, I would just say "AND them together, then". Or just do the Elite Four; the credits scroll when you beat them, which I think is a pretty clear indication of "win". Catching them all is more akin to completing all the achievements in the game. (And requires running multiple coordinated games, as, for example, the starting 3 are only available once, at the beginning of the game. In order to "catch them all", you need two games where the player 1. doesn't evolve their starter and 2. trades it to you. Since usually the starter is the core of someone's team in a normal human game, I think one would normally run a small game. Or find someone you trust and only briefly trade the Pokémon, then trade it back, which counts as far as the Pokédex cares. Eevee, a Pokémon that can evolve 3 different ways in Gen I, represents a similar problem: you only get one, and have to choose. (I think Gen II's breeding system might work around some or most of this issue.))

While Super Mario is perhaps comparatively easy, I would offer up NetHack. It is "open-world" in much the same sense as Pokémon: you have an explorable area, but one that is still mostly linear. There are several "sub-modes" to solve, like the article notes about Pokémon: in Pokémon, you need to explore, train, capture new Pokémon, battle; in NetHack, you also need to explore, battle, manage items, solve Sokoban puzzles, etc.

Pokémon is fairly hard to "lose"; losing a battle just returns you to the nearest Pokémon center w/ half your money gone. (That might be more of an issue in Gen I, where, IIRC, money is finite until you beat the Elite Four; in Gen II, as soon as you have a trainer's phone number, I think money is technically infinite. Regardless, simply training a few Pokémon to Lvl 100 should be sufficient.) NetHack, however, is very easy to lose; death is permanent, and requires restarting from scratch.

And NetHack has been won by a machine: https://www.reddit.com/r/nethack/comments/2tluxv/yaap_fullau...

The comparison to chess and go seems strange to me, I wonder if you could elaborate?

Certainly chess has a mental component, players develop styles, study one another, and try to throw opponents off balance. But all of that happens as a layer on top of the need to actually make good moves over the board - a bishop and knight endgame simply has a correct answer. Go is less constrained, but it's still alternating turns in a deterministic, perfect information setting.

Pokemon, meanwhile, looks to me somewhere between DOTA and poker. It's nondeterministic on crits, paralysis, accuracy, and a great deal else. It's effectively nondiscrete, in the sense that there's lots of variance which has only a chance of mattering. And it's heavily hidden-information - defining features like moveset aren't revealed. Meanwhile, the OpenAI Dota restrictions are heavily centered on removing hidden information (invisibility, wards) and unexpected state changes (summons, quelling blade, infused raindrop).

I expect Pokemon would be more tractable on these issues because the hidden information is usually discrete. (Think "does he have Protect" as opposed to "is he standing invisible on this pixel?") But they're still major stumbling blocks, especially with randomness that massively expands the branching factor of each interaction. A given Pokemon move might look something like "if Ferrothorn uses Leech Seed, will it hit, and if so will he switch out, and if so will he go to Kartana, and if he does will it Swords Dance or does it have Choice Band or does it have Fightinium Z, or will he go to Koko, and if so does it have HP Fire or is it a bluff?" Everything there past "use this move" is laboring under a high branching factor with high randomness.

I don't think it'd be impossible to do fairly well on the Pokemon Showdown ladder with a medium amount of advance work; an AI can run a damage calculator and just assume every enemy has one of the recommended movesets from the wiki, and be assigned a viable team with relatively low variance and branching. But if you take away any of that hand curation, I expect things would go downhill pretty fast. And if you take it out of Showdown premades into a format where the enemy lineup isn't known in advance, I'd expect the now-intractable branching factor to lead to very poor performance with incredibly slow progress.

It'd be a damn interesting experiment, though.