Pac-Man, How Does It Work?

Speaking of game AI…two Pac-Man-related links are making the blog rounds these days – one of them is new.

The new one is Chad Birch’s “Understanding Pac-Man Ghost Behavior”. It is clear and well illustrated.

As Chad points out, he was inspired by and used Jamey Pittman’s “Pac-Man Dossier”. This is a nice resource.

It also seems that I haven’t previously blogged Don Hodges’ fix to a bug in the behavior of two of the ghosts. (The bug-fixing of classic videogames is a topic we will return to in the future.)

Of course, the ghosts need a Pac-Man to chase. I have previously linked to a Ms. Pac-Man computer player competition. Of specific interest is this paper on evolving rules to play Ms. Pac-Man (seems that I have not directly linked it before).

(Post title is of course a play on the “magnets…” meme.)

2 responses to “Pac-Man, How Does It Work?”

  1. Peter Lin says:

    I just looked at the design of NRuler and it looks like it’s not quite functional yet. The design uses generics heavily, which is ok. The downside is arraylists generic or not are slow. Jamocha and Creshendo use object arrays for that reason. The design of the nodes in NRuler doesn’t look complete yet. There’s no exist ce and Not ce doesn’t appear to be complete either. it will be interesting to see how it develops over the next few years.

  2. Peter Lin says:

    forgot to say thanks for blogging about nruler, I noticed it was listed on the related posts.

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