Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy of the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, have created a contest to create software that will learn how to play Mario successfully the same way that humans do - by playing it over, and over, and over. It sounds like a joke, but Togelius is convinced of its importance in comparing attitudes in software and artificial intelligence development, and also of his choice of test game:

As far as I'm concerned, Mario is the computer game, both as a gamer and as a good machine-learning challenge that requires a broad set of skills.

(The actual test game will be a recreation of the original game, rather than the real Super Mario, sadly.)

Winners will be named - and given cash prizes! - at London's Games Innovation Conference later this month, and Italy's IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in September.

Race is on to evolve the ultimate Mario [New Scientist]

You can't get more realistic than this tee that proclaims, Terry Bisson style, "I am made of meat!" You can find it, and proclaim your true biological function, here.

Then there's the secret history of Alien's love for Predator, which you should proclaim loud and proud on your chest. You can get the tee here, and get some alien/predator love action here [NSFW].

And just to put all of this in perspective, we have the most truthful shirt of all, which offers us a chart explaining why the humor of memes like the ones on these tees is inversely proportional to their popularity. Let the world know the true worth of memes by buying this meme-laden shirt here.

* In the film, Goku is a semi-normal high school student, rather than a childish monkey-boy with a tail who lives in the woods. However, even in the anime and manga, Goku does eventually grow up from a three-foot-tall Peanuts character into a normal-sized, perhaps Chatwin-sized adult.
* Piccolo's skin isn't a very bright green, and he doesn't seem to have antennae
* Master Roshi, who in the manga is a dirty old man who asks to look at Bulma's panties in return for a Dragon Ball, doesn't commit any acts of sexual harassment
* a bunch of characters have been removed, including Kuririn (Goku's fellow student under Master Roshi), the talking animals Pu'ar and Oolong, and Master Roshi's pet turtle
* plenty of plots and subplots have been removed, leaving the movie as kind of a mixture of Dragon Ball volumes 1-2 (the introduction of Goku and Bulma) and 13-16 (the introduction of Piccolo, and the big fight).

There's plenty more. A more serious complaint, however, is that "the script is an absolute, unmitigated disaster," to quote Zach Berlatsky of anime news network. What does the creator, Akira Toriyama himself, think about the Dragonball adaptation? Here's a translation of his words in a text announcement preceding a February 2009 promotional video:

"As the original creator, I had a feeling of "Huh?" upon seeing the screenplay and the character designs, but the director, all the actors, the staff, and the rest are nothing but "ultra" high-caliber people. Maybe the right way for me and all the fans to appreciate it is as a New Dragonball of a different dimension. Perhaps, this might become a great masterpiece of power! Hey, I look forward to it!!"

Toriyama is more charitable to Hollywood than Alan Moore-but then again, Toriyama, like most manga artists, has always had no illusions about producing mass entertainment. (Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Dragonball: Evolution is not the first Dragon Ball film; that honor goes to 1989's Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins, an unlicensed Chinese live-action adaptation.)

The best thing going for Dragonball: Evolution is that, beneath all the spiky hair and shouting, Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball is a good story. (Particularly if you're a 14-year-old boy.) The fights and cliffhangers are exciting, the villains are reprehensible and the heroes are noble (and sometimes the villains are noble too, deep down), and the mixture of sci-fi, fantasy and comedy is entertaining and imaginative.

But there are other elements of Dragon Ball which may be difficult to make the transition to live action. One of these is the quirky, simple art style which gives Toriyama's work so much of its appeal. Toriyama's stories may be intense by the standards of American children's animation, but the appeal of his art is the cartooniness, which, when Dragon Ball started in the '80s, stood out among more square-jawed macho manga like City Hunter and Fist of the North Star. (Today, on the other hand, the influence of Dragon Ball has made the big-eyed, spiky-haired angular look the default manga style.) Putting simple, cartoony characters in dramatic situations is one of the trademark elements of manga and anime, and a more interesting way to adapt Dragon Ball might have been with film-quality animation or CGI, like the upcoming Astro Boy live-action movie. Although Keanu Reeves may not look entirely like Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop, no real human being can look quite like a Toriyama character.

To use another example, Akira is set in a recognizably real urban sci-fi environment, but Dragon Ball is set in a primary-colored, fairytale world. The Wachowski Bros.' Speed Racer tried the "live-action cartoon" approach, with mixed success, but will Dragonball: Evolution go the grim-and-gritty route and turn out like the live-action Super Mario Bros.? Manga and anime fans cringe at the word "cartoon," but it's a good word to describe Toriyama's creations: a world which combines aliens and magic dragons, comedy and drama, absurdity and sincerity, a world of sweat and blood and winking unrealism.

The wily plumber Bros. have accidentally gotten into the dinosaur world, and are trying to rescue Luigi's love interest Daisy — who, it turns out, is actually the princess of dinosaur town. Evil Koopa has taken over by de-evolving the good king into a primordial sludge, whose icky strands blanket the dinosaur city. Now Koopa wants to break through the dimensional doorway to Earth, so he can have all the resources of our lovely, primate-run world.

The movie is as cheesy as you can imagine, and yet I love it for its bizarre inventiveness in the face of orders that must have been something like: "Make a movie about guys who jump up and down in a mushroom world." The concept design is superlative, with the slime-covered, polluted dinosaur city looking cool and cartoony at once. Plus: these are real actors, people. Say what you want about the unbelievably silly premise, but Hopper, Hoskins, and Leguizamo know how to make the best of it. Need something cute and unbelievably strange to watch tonight? Super Mario Bros. might be the ticket.

Super Mario Bros. [Amazon]