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."

Problems...

[Darkness404]

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.

The entire point of Mario is consistent levels with well timed jumps to reach secrets. I'm not sure if I want levels generated by computers. 50 quality levels are better than 100 AI generated levels.

Re:feel kind of dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

As a non-programmer . . . WTF am I supposed to do with this?

Wallow in your inadequacies and marvel in the brilliance of others with time, talent, (and possibly training).

That's what I'm planning on doing.

River Raid does this

[Visoblast]

River Raid, the old Atari 2600 game from Activision, uses a pseudo random number generator to produce the game levels. It was a great way to avoid putting the levels in the game's limited ROM (2K?).

Old but good ideas just keep coming back.

Re:Random Levels

[Ark42]

1991, Sega - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_Jam_and_Earl [wikipedia.org]