Super Mario AI Contest

[woogley]

http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/

Contest to write an AI Mario Controller with Java. Seems interesting. August 18th is the deadline.

(via reddit)

[Markus_Persson]

Hey cool, I wrote that. =D

[Eli Delventhal]

That's pretty cool. I wonder how I would do it. I would probably just program a hand-coded algorithm based on a subsumption architecture or something, because doing a learning algorithm in a platformer just gets too obscenely complicated to do any good (I know from experience). I guess though that there's no limit on the heap size for the contest, so you could create a learning AI with a ginormous state space and maybe get away with something that really worked well after being "trained" for a few days. But it seems to me that the situations in Mario are simple enough that abstracting the world into a few hand-coded rules would work a lot better (are you about to be hit by an enemy, is there a question block nearby, etc. etc.)

Games published by our own members! Go get 'em!

[woogley]

This is really cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s3d1LfjWCI

The AI visualizes its paths as it automatically plays through Infinite Mario Bros

[Eli Delventhal]

This is really cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s3d1LfjWCI

The AI visualizes its paths as it automatically plays through Infinite Mario Bros

Wow already. Pretty good, seems to avoid everything without a problem really.

[h3ckboy]

Wow already. Pretty good, seems to avoid everything without a problem really.

yeah if you watch the "harder level". The AI nearly falls in a hole. but he does soem stuff I didnt know what possible to get out.

[Eli Delventhal]

yeah if you watch the "harder level". The AI nearly falls in a hole. but he does soem stuff I didnt know what possible to get out.

Yeah, close. Weird physics abuse to get out of the hole...

[woogley]

It's not physics abuse actually. Markus intentionally added the Wall Jump feature, as it appears in New Mario Bros for the DS.

[Eli Delventhal]

It's not physics abuse actually. Markus intentionally added the Wall Jump feature, as it appears in New Mario Bros for the DS.

Oh, cool. I haven't played that one, so I didn't know.