Pac-Man, How Does It Work?

December 8, 2010

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.)

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Posted by Karl W. Reinsch

Learning To Play Mario Bros.

August 6, 2009

Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy have organized a competition to create an agent (or AI) that plays the video game Super Mario Bros. – or, more accurately, Infinite Mario Bros. a tribute game featuring random level generation.

The advantage of using Infinite Mario Bros. is the random level generation – which can let the agent learn more generalized playing tactics rather than tactics that are tailored to a static set of levels as in Ms. Pac-Man or Pitfall.

I look forward to seeing the results of the competition, and hope to see source code published as well.

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Posted by Karl W. Reinsch