he Gameplay TrackThe 2010 championship saw both new (five) and old (three)competitors entering, and the best controllers were significantlybetter players than previous years. We kept improving thebenchmark as described above between the three competitionevents, and therefore the scoresattained in different events arenot directly comparable. In particular, the EvoStar competitionevent did not yet include levels with dead ends (which were partof the two later competition events) though it did include levelsthat were overall harder than those in the 2009 competition.Because of the gradual evolution of the interface, and thefact that most interface changes were additions of new modesof experiencing the environment, almost complete backwardscompatibility has been maintained for controllers. This meansthat participants in the 2009 competition could enter the 2010gameplay track with none or only minor changes to their con-trollers. Therefore, a relativelyhigh number of participants hasbeen maintained throughout the 2010 competition events, andnew ideas could easily be compared with the best of the pre-vious controllers. In particular, Robin Baumgarten entered allthree gameplay events with incrementally refined versions ofthe controller that won the 2009 competition. Still, there werefewer competitors in 2010 than there were in 2009, which canbe explained partly by that we could not get the same media at-tention as we got for the 2009 competition, and partly by thatthe levels were harder and several of the competitors more ma-ture, suggesting that newcomerswith weaker entries that wouldhave submitted their entries if they thought they had a chanceof winning chose not to do so as they thought the competitionto be too stiff.One strong new contender in the 2010 championship was theREALMagent, due to Slawomir Bojarski and Clare Bates Con-gdon. This agent is built on sets of rules, which are evolved of-fline to maximize the distance traveled by the agent. An agent isbuilt up of a set of 20 rules, where each rule has a handful of pre-conditions that test for relatively primitive aspects of the gamestate, such as whether Mario may jump or there is an enemyabove to the left. The consequences of the rules, on the otherhand