While I’m of the opinion that there’s nothing quite like a painstakingly handcrafted videogame level with well-thought-out hidden goodies, procedural generation can be pretty neat too. That’s one of the themes for this year’s Mario AI Championship.
I think we covered the competition previously, but I can’t find the post. Drat! In its place, here’s a ridiculously cool YouTube video that sums everything up quite nicely. The 2010 competition — which is, again, part of the IEEE conference — now has three tracks: gameplay, learning, and level generation.
As word spreads, you can surely expect to see some truly awe-inspiring videos come out in the near future as more and more people get their feet wet. I would go on, but little of this stuff makes sense to a non-programmer like myself.
IEEE Introduces Mario Level-Generation Competition [Slashdot]
