A BETTER MARIO BUILT: ROBIN BAUMGARTEN TOPS MARIO AI COMPETITION

The very first entry into Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy’s Mario AI Competition 2009 — Robin Baumgarten’s A*-enhanced agent previously featured here — has emerged the winner, barely scraping ahead of second place.

Above is a slow-motion run of Baumgarten’s agent that shows you second by second the mindboggling array of potential moves the agent cycles through in working out what I’m almost positive would be a pretty instantaneous death for me.

Find Baumgarten’s source code and further details here, and see the competition’s final presentation notes here.