The 2010 Mario AI Championship: Level Generation Track

The Level Generation Competition, part of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS)-sponsored 2010 Mario AI Championship, was to our knowledge the world's first procedural content generation competition. Competitors participated by submitting level generators - software that generates new levels for a version of Super Mario Bros tailored to individual players' playing style. This paper presents the rules of the competition, the software used, the scoring procedure, the submitted level generators, and the results of the competition. We also discuss what can be learned from this competition, both about organizing procedural content generation competitions and about automatically generating levels for platform games. The paper is coauthored by the organizers of the competition (the first three authors) and the competitors.

[1]  Michael Mateas,et al.  Tanagra: a mixed-initiative level design tool , 2010, FDG.

[2]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Search-Based Procedural Content Generation: A Taxonomy and Survey , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[3]  Ingo Althöfer,et al.  Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Recombination Games , 2010, J. Int. Comput. Games Assoc..

[4]  Georgios N. Yannakakis.  How to model and augment player satisfaction: a review , 2008, WOCCI.

[5]  Katie Salen,et al.  Rules of play: game design fundamentals , 2003 .

[6]  Philippe Pasquier,et al.  Towards a Generic Framework for Automated Video Game Level Creation , 2010, EvoApplications.

[7]  Gillian Smith,et al.  A framework for analysis of 2D platformer levels , 2008, Sandbox '08.

[8]  Luc Van Gool,et al.  Procedural modeling of buildings , 2006, SIGGRAPH 2006.

[9]  Rafael Bidarra,et al.  Integrating procedural generation and manual editing of virtual worlds , 2010, PCGames@FDG.

[10]  Jyh-Shing Roger Jang,et al.  ANFIS: adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system , 1993, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern..

[11]  Julian Togelius,et al.  The 2009 Mario AI Competition , 2010, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

[12]  Alex J. Champandard.  AI Game Development , 2003 .

[13]  Ian Parberry,et al.  Controlled Procedural Terrain Generation Using Software Agents , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[14]  Mario Romero,et al.  Tableau Machine: A Creative Alien Presence , 2008, AAAI Spring Symposium: Creative Intelligent Systems.

[15]  Hideyuki Takagi,et al.  Interactive evolutionary computation: fusion of the capabilities of EC optimization and human evaluation , 2001, Proc. IEEE.

[16]  Georgios N. Yannakakis,et al.  TOWARDS OPTIMIZING ENTERTAINMENT IN COMPUTER GAMES , 2007, Appl. Artif. Intell..

[17]  Georgios N. Yannakakis,et al.  Towards affective camera control in games , 2010, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction.

[18]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Modeling player experience in Super Mario Bros , 2009, 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[19]  Noah Wardrip-Fruin,et al.  Polymorph: dynamic difficulty adjustment through level generation , 2010, PCGames@FDG.

[20]  J. Whitehead.  Toward proccedural decorative ornamentation in games , 2010 .

[21]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Towards automatic personalised content creation for racing games , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[22]  Julian Togelius,et al.  The 2009 Simulated Car Racing Championship , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[23]  Kenneth O. Stanley,et al.  Evolving content in the Galactic Arms Race video game , 2009, 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[24]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Search-Based Procedural Content Generation , 2010, EvoApplications.

[25]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Modeling Player Experience for Content Creation , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[26]  Agnar Aamodt,et al.  Case-Based Reasoning: Foundational Issues, Methodological Variations, and System Approaches , 1994, AI Commun..

[27]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Towards Automatic Personalized Content Generation for Platform Games , 2010, AIIDE.

[28]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

[29]  Michael Mateas,et al.  Rhythm-based level generation for 2D platformers , 2009, FDG.

[30]  Michael Mateas,et al.  Procedural level generation using occupancy-regulated extension , 2010, Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[31]  Philippe Pasquier,et al.  The Evolution of Fun: Automatic Level Design Through Challenge Modeling , 2010, ICCC.

[32]  Georgios N. Yannakakis,et al.  Real-Time Game Adaptation for Optimizing Player Satisfaction , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[33]  Jesper Juul.  Fear of Failing ? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games , 2011 .

[34]  Philip Hingston,et al.  A new design for a Turing Test for Bots , 2010, Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games.