Topic: Ok, are there Mario Kart bots?

[ShyGuy]

I was playing tonight and one of the racers seemed very odd. The nick was goomba and its icon was a blue circle with some sort of squiggle across the middle. They played as R.O.B in drybones coffin kart.

Now here's the weird part. At the start of every single race, they would turn right and run into the wall. After that, they drove the exact same pattern in Delfino square, EXACTLY the same. They always chose Delfino square as the course and the one time we raced moo-moo farm, they ran into the wall at the starting line on that level too.

I guess it would make sense for Nintendo to put some bots out there to keep things populated, but I haven't heard about this anywhere. Can anyone offer more info?

Oh, the smack talk: they p0wned me, and I'd like to see a PGCer take them down.

[JHarris]

Interesting.  But how did they beat you if they could only play successfully on one level?  What happened at the end of the race if they couldn't drive successfully?  And, am I missing something here?

Bots playing recorded motions might possibly work in the game, were that driver the only one on the course.  Player interactions would quickly throw such a system out of whack. Anything that changed a vehicle's position from where the script expects it to be at a given moment would have a high chance of destroying the script's effectiveness.  For a bot to work in multiplayer Mario Kart, it'd have to be algorithmic, and that would require a lot of work.  I wouldn't say it's impossible, but considering the length of time the game's been out, I wouldn't put money on it.

[decoyman]

Perhaps I'm showing my ignorance here, but why couldn't they just use the AI of the computer players in the normal game to create bots?