I don't understand why the algorithm didn't pick up on his score in Tetris monotonically increasing - unless he was just such a bad player that the number of rows also monotonically increased?
I was referring to the "pause just before dying" behavior, which would have persisted even with enough search depth to make lines.
"Pretty simple" algorithm playing games quite impressively.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCurBYI_gY
First, this is awesome - enjoy!
Paper here http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf
One interesting observation made by Tom Murphy is that the AI found and exploited playable bugs in the game not (commonly) known to human players. I think it's a good example to have available suggesting what a really smart AI might look for to win.