We're never going to win the war against the machines at this rate if they keep going at it with this stuff:

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/59883

Though when they say the computer pulls off a move only a computer could do ( wall-jumping out of a pit ), I have to say that, because of the program the game is based off of, it is actually not only possible, it's actually not that hard, as I did it myself with little effort. What gets me is how it seems to kill the piranha plants that jump out of the pipes from below them - maybe a fireball somehow is shot and connects right before it? Still seems odd.

Feel free to post your own neat AI-used-in-games stuff.

In that particular version the piranha plants don't have stalks. You can kill them by punching them from below while they're in the air.

I know how it does the under-kill to the plants, but I wasn't aware wall jumping was possible in any pre-n64 mario.

It always was. Crappy collision detection. The n64 version just made it an officially sanctioned move.

Not to diminish the work, but the AI involved in this is pretty basic stuff. The coder used the A* algorithm which is pretty easy to implement (I assume rbots used it?), it's excellent for pathfinding but not much else.

What would be more interesting is if the randomly generated levels somehow included more elaborate level design and puzzles so that the competition becomes less about who can make the fastest implementation of A* and more about who can code something that is genuinely clever.

It was only in Mario 1, actually, before Mario 64 introduced it as an official move. This version of Mario isn't your regular Mario game, it's a PC imitation called "Infinite Mario". As you can see it has a few tweaks, but mostly the point of the imitation is that the levels are randomly generated.

I guess I didn't play enough mario to know about wall jumping. I was too busy warping