Wow. First thought: who is this guy who submits a really cool scientific result to a thing like SIGBOVIK? He could have sent this thing to a real conference! It's a thing no one has ever tried!
Then I checked out his website. The academic one. And the others.
Well, short description: "Superhero of Productivity". The list of stuff he created doesn't fit on his site. Sites. Also, see this remark of his,
One of the best things about grad school was that if you get your work done then you get to do other stuff too.
(I'm also at CS grad school, am happy if I have time to sleep, and my only productive output is... LW comments... does that count?)
"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.