Coding for Mario

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Call for Participation in the Mario Competition
IEEE Games Innovation Conference (ICE-GIC 09)

Organized by Sergey Karakovskiy and Julian Togelius, 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.

URL: 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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