I get know about contests like http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/ and http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/contest/ only after the winners are announced.
Can anyone point me to an upcoming contest of a similar kind ?
There's a Starcraft AI competition at a conference in Palo Alto this fall, which is probably the hardest in this category of competitions (playing a full Starcraft game well is pretty nontrivial), though there are also three categories for restricted versions of the game: http://eis.ucsc.edu/StarCraftAICompetition