Through some roundabout way, I heard about this AI competition today; I can't tell exactly how long the competition has been going on, but according to the mailing list the cash prizes were announced today so that's probably why it showed up on my radar.
The basic gist, if you didn't follow (or have not yet followed) the link, is pretty simple: write an AI that plays Super Mario World-era Mario well, on random levels. Also, the cash prizes are restricted to conference attendees (the IEEE Games Innovation Conference in London, and the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in Milan). So the contest aspect of it as a whole seems a bit uninteresting to me. Admittedly, it might be a bit more interesting to students who, cash prizes or no, would like to get their name out to the wider world.
On the other hand, it's also a platform for learning AI, regardless of contests or prizes: the game engine, the graphics, and simple examples already done and presented for you to tinker with. Whether your day job is in the game industry or completely outside it, AI is a hard thing to fall into on the job; this seems like a great opportunity to learn and demonstrate proficiency outside concerns of job performance. :-)
So are you entering the contest?
Still, I've been messing around with it a bit. Contest or no it's a neat toolkit.