Engineers Succeed in Beating Ms. Pac-Man High Score by Developing an Artificial Player

A team of engineers was recently successful in developing an artificial Ms. Pac Man player making use of a completely new approach towards computation of real-time gaming strategy. This new artificial character has been successful in attaining the highest score with respect to a computerised game. It happens to be one of the most popular arcade games, Ms. Pac-Mac need to keep away all ghost enemies while she is collecting different items and makes her way through obstacle-populated maze. It is one of the favorites among computer scientists and engineers who have been competing for quite some time to program the best mechanized player.

artificial Ms. Pac-Man

The best score at yearly Ms. Pac-Man Screen Capture Competition has been at 36, 280. However, a trio of researchers that included a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor from Cornell, Silvia Ferrari, was successful in generating lab score of 43, 720. The high score could be achieved with the use of decision-tree approach under which artificial player moves are extracted from a complete maze of dynamic equations and geometry that finds out the ghosts movements with a high accuracy of 94.6 percent. As the game moves ahead. The decision tree keeps getting an upgrade in real-time.

Ferrari says, “The novelty of our method is in how the decision tree is generated, combining both geometric elements of the maze with information-gathering objectives.” She noticed that any kind of information in this respect pertains to fruits collected by Ms. Pac-Man for bonus points. Her team is one of the first ones to model a game’s components mathematically. All previous artificial players till date were developed only with the help of model-free methods which didn’t prove to be that efficient. This new approach is great and will definitely play a significant role in future developments.