Infinite Mario AI - Long Level

Reminds me of the AI competition on infinite mario, recently: Here is a video of the winning bot (A* based approach), cool to watch, as they display its trajectory calculations. [this video] GA is cool and everything, but I am sometimes sceptical about its merits. Yes, it gives you a natural problem representation, but would it really have done a better job in this particular domain than using a technique like simulated annealing to move through the Mario AI parameter space? We just don't know without seeing benchmark comparisons. Maybe its much worse. So, its a cool application, but we should be cautious about how quickly we decide GA was a particularly suitable search algorithm.

I seem to miss such contests most of the time and only hear about them when they ended. I would love to attend to some, just for the fun (because I don't know if I would have any chance to actually win). Where would be a good source for such competitions? Another fun competition I read about was the Super Mario AI competition in 2009 where the winner has succeeded with an A* algorithm which he presented in a nice video: [this video] The 2010 Mario AI championship also seems to be over already. Another fun competition I have heard about is the International Obfuscated C Code Contest. However, while reading this is very interesting and quite fun, I am not sure if I would have fun to do this myself. (Somehow I am more focused on the output/result of the code and I like to have clean, elegant and intelligent code, as less obfuscated as possible. :))