The Talos Principle, a game about A.I., used an A.I. bot to solve its dozens of puzzles over and over again. Actually, it was developer Croteam that implemented the A.I., but still, pretty meta, right?
The testing bot, which Croteam calls "Testing Bot," plows through like a speedrunner, solving, re-solving, and also intentionally failing, the critically acclaimed first-person puzzler. Anytime Croteam made changes, however small, they'd put Testing Bot through the paces, making sure they hadn't broken anything in the process of making changes. Testing Bot is a sturdy little program that, of course, requires no sleep, never gets mental fatigue, and never complains about the lack of Mt. Dew and Doritos as compensation.
The video below shows Testing Bot in action. A mild part of me gets upset watching this. It solves in 2.5 minutes what I'm almost certain took me 10 times longer to solve. But can Testing Bot hear a paradox without exploding? What can it tell us about this thing called "love"? What about getting a tiny bit of water on it without breaking forever even though it was just a stupid tiny bit of water?
There. I feel better now. Seems we humans still have a thing or two that we do better than Testing Bot here, don't we, Testing Bot?
There are puzzle-solving spoilers in the video below. But I'd call them mild spoilers, since it's running so quickly that you won't remember all the solutions. (Unless you watch the video multiple times, in which case, you're looking for spoilers and solutions, so you're not worried about a spoiler tag anyway.)
The Talos Principle is coming to PlayStation 4 on October 13. (Our review will go up the week before, on October 8.) It's also been on Android since May 28, and on PC since December 11 of last year.
