http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/
Contest to write an AI Mario Controller with Java. Seems interesting. August 18th is the deadline.
(via reddit)
Hey cool, I wrote that. =D
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.)
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.
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…
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.