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IEEE Consumer Electronics Society's
Games Innovation Conference
Call for Participation in the Mario Competition
Organised by:
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Julian Togelius |
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Sergey Karakovskiy |
In association with the IEEE Games Innovation Conference 2009, this competition is about learning, or otherwise developing, the best controller (agent) for a version of Super Mario Bros, defined as the controller that wins as many levels (of increasing difficulty) as possible.
One of the main purposes of this competition is to be able to compare different controller development methodologies against each other, both those based on learning techniques such as artificial evolution and those that are completely hand-coded. We hope to attract leading experts on various learning methods and controller architectures to test their techniques on this challenging problem. But we also encourage using the competition and its associated software for student projects and assignments.
The competition software is in Java and designed to be as simple as possible to get started with, with no external dependencies. Submissions in Java are encouraged, but any programming language can be used thanks to a TCP client/server interface (example Python client provided). The organization of the competition is similar to the simulated car racing competitions held in conjunction with recent IEEE conferences: submission will be by email, and the source code of all submitted entries will be published on the competition web page.
Deadline for submitting controllers: 18 August, a week before ICE-GIC in London.
http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/mariocompetition (please join this group if you plan to participate in the competition - all technical discussion will take part in this group)
Competitors will be invited to give short presentations of their controllers at ICE-GIC, and a prize will be awarded for the best controller. Attendance at the conference is not mandatory for participating in the competition.
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