2026-08-02 · paper-digest
Ponnock & Ho: The Order of Mario 1-1 Has a Measurable Teaching Effect — Fukai Reads
A reinforcement learning and level design paper by Jesse Ponnock and Lucas Ho (arXiv preprint, not peer-reviewed). Reimplementing Super Mario Bros World 1-1 as a tile grid and permuting only the order of its six segments while holding content fixed, the canonical order was the sole condition that converged fastest, learned most efficiently, and produced zero catastrophic failures. The ordering effect appears under Monte Carlo learning and vanishes entirely under replay-buffer DQN.
