IEEE Introduces Mario Level-Generation Competition

bgweber writes "Last year, the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games hosted a competition to determine who could write the best AI for playing Mario levels (YouTube video). This year, the conference has expanded the competition to include a track on level generation as well, where the goal is to generate new levels online procedurally. Submitting an entry is as easy as implementing a Java interface that performs procedural content generation. The implications of this competition are techniques for greatly increasing the replayability of games, since each gameplay session could present new levels to the player."

Comments

Done

[gpf2]

Congratulations adventurer! Your quest is at an end for you have reached the home of NetHack.

Re:Problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

Randomly generated dungeons are fine and generally fun because the entire point is to explore. Randomly generated Mario levels are going to be more frustrating than anything else because the AI is going to have very little knowledge of difficulty let alone themes and re-playability.

Umm...I think you might be missing the point of this track of competition. It is a given that haphazard Mario levels would not be fun to plan. Developing algorithms that randomly create fun levels is a difficult problem. Test players will play these levels and rank them. Chances are, there will be some generators that consistently create fun levels, while others will consistently create boring levels. It may be difficult to anticipate the subjective tastes of the testers, but that just adds to the challenge.