Looks like fun. Although I can barely keep my head above the water with C++ and have no interest in learning Java at this moment in time, add that to having never programmed any sort of AI at all... well, I wont be entering.

Will certainly keep an eye on it to see the responses though.

Does that infinite mario game applet work for you? I only see the intro screen but it doesn't respond to clicks or key presses.

Doesn't work for me. By the way, I was listening to music with auricular and the midi music almost killed my ears.

The applet should flash "click to play" if it doesn't have focus, and in game the a key is the B button, s is the A button, and the arrow keys move.

Well, since nobody can play it except me...

The game randomly generates an overworld map, featuring Mario-3-esque stages, mushroom houses, fortresses, and castles. Each stage is randomly generated and persists for the duration of your game. The stage can be either with a cave tileset or an overworld tileset (maybe more, I haven't made it very far into any game). The only enemies I have seen are red/green Koopas, Goombas and piranhas. There are pipes in the levels, but I have yet to find a secret area. A significant portion of the breakable blocks are actually hidden pickups. You can collect coins, mushrooms, and Fire Flowers. I have not seen any 1-up mushrooms, so you pretty much only get 3 lives and then your game ends

It's simplistic, and I don't know how similar the AI competition's version is to this, but it's a fun game either way

s/ /¶/

Yes, that's exactly right. Your program doesn't select where to go on the overworld map, you only control the behavior on the actual levels.

That video impressed me , what kind of AI is that?, I have never seen something like that, it looks like is testing with a projectile motion movement? or just a bezier curve? can someone explain how this technique works?

It looks like it's processing and making more adjustments to the controls at more then just 24fps which I think was against some rule... Or am I missunderstanding that?

I don't know if it happens, or if it is possible, or if it is against some rules - but the way I see it is this: if the AI uses only what is on the screen as its input, and its output is restricted to whatever user controls are allowed by the game, then it doesn't really matter how many cycles per second it does or how quickly it makes adjustments to the controls. If the AI wants to change its mind about which buttons will be pressed during the next frame, who cares? It can't get any advantage by doing that anyway because the game will only register new inputs at a certain rate.