I imagine for the bots you mentioned, that they are programmed with specific logic for those games. As for the NES emulator capable of playing the second player

I imagine for the bots you mentioned, that they are programmed with specific logic for those games. As for the NES emulator capable of playing the second player, I imagine that would be a similar story. The research here is not a computer program that plays games. Rather, it's a computer program that (attempts to) play any game, without having any understanding of what it means to play that game, purely by watching the buttons that a human player would press while playing that game.