very cool presentation thanks for the info

now send it against kaizo mario. i think not.

i just read that the Minecraft guy also authored the original infinte mario

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/157149894/infinite-mario-ai-competition

http://www.minecraft.net

http://videogames.videosift.com/talk/Mine-Craft-the-worlds-greatest-game

This Mario AI implementation sort of takes advantage of the rules of the Mario AI competition, apparently.

The rules stated that the AIs shouldn't use information taken from the Infinite Mario engine classes (this would effectively let the AI know what was coming up in the future). Instead, the AIs were meant to use an "observation" class that broke the screen in to a grid and said what was inside each square. This grid was not very fine grained (only ~22*22), and so it didn't give accurate information as to the exact location of enemies on screen, so the problem was a lot harder using this technique.

Robin (the creator of the AI here) worked around the rules a little by almost doing a copy/paste of the engine classes in to his own code, then using those to obtain very exact information.

Valid within the exact confines of the rules, but a bit cheeky and not really in the spirit of the competition!