Thanks alot for allt he replies. I'll try to cover all questions and uncertainties here:

@Timmiluvs: I intend to do this for a course on Machine Vision and Machine Learning, so I'm not completely avers against on-screen clues, I just want to keep the screen info as digestable as possible. As to your question about what kind of exploits I'm looking for - I'm trying not to restrict myself too much, but my favorite kind would be glitches (like wall clipping) that make the player skip part of a level / game. I've seen this alot in 3D-Games like Ocarina of Time, and I'm looking for something similar in 2D-games. The sound clues you mentioned therefore aren't as interessting for two reasons: first of all I at least imagine it being quite difficult to access that info (which unfortunately is a factor in a project that needs to be finished within 3 months amongst other stuff to do), second of all to me that sounds more like a game design choice to assist players who pay attention to it, similar to how in Dark Souls the bosses patterns (usually) match the rhythm of their respective themes.

@oddtom: Do you by any chance know of significant glitches that allow the player to skip a noteworthy section of the games? In Stadium I know now exploits at all, and for the other Pokemon games I can only recall the infinite-items-exploit and how to get a lvl 100 nidoking before battleing Brock.

@607: I want the machine to learn it, I do not want hard-code the exploits. I'm not sure on what learning strategy to use, but neural networks are certainly out there, together with reinforcement learning (or both comined in deep reinforcement learning)

@Shtrudel: To all Super Mario games have exploits like that? If so, I'll definetly look into that!

@Mistunee: Yes, I've seen that one before. Actually, this video is pretty much what inspired me to choose this project. But instead of just recreating something that has been done before, I wanted to add a spin to is - that's why I'm specifically looking for exploitable games :)

Again, thanks alot to all of you for your help! It certainly is very much appreciated! :)

tl;dr - I'm searching for a simple game with known exploits to teach an AI to speedrun it

I'm a student of computer science in Germany and want to develop an AI that's learning to do speedruns. Ideally, I'd prefer a simple game (little input-possibilities, little on-screen-info, little background-mechanics) like the old GameBoy-Games (thinking of Super Mario and stuff here). Also I'd love to see if it's possible for the machine to learn using exploits. So the game shouldn't only be simple but also have known exploits. In addittion to that, the game should run on a PC (at least with an emulator).

I have no personal experience with speedrunning other than watching a few every once in a while, so I came to you for help and guidance. I assume that people take speedrunning very seriously, which I understand and respect. I have no intention to submit results of an AI as my own, I'm not aiming at breaking any records or anything. I just think it's a really cool scenario to get into machine learning!

Also I'm not trying to find solutions here - I want to and will do the actual work myself. I'm just asking for games to take into consideration. But in case anyone got any further advice, especially what to consider during research and what related work or websites to look into, I'm always thankful for input!

So long, and thanks alot in advance,

Batt