Ms. Pac-Man
Ms
Pac-Man, the classic arcade game from the 1980s is
one of the best-known video games ever made. In the
Ms Pac-Man vs Ghosts competition you are asked to
create computer programs (controllers) to play the
game as either Ms Pac-Man or the ghosts. The
controller, which will have to provide a direction
at every game tick (40 milliseconds), competes
against all the controllers submitted by other
competitors to determine the most effective
strategy.
The goal of this competition is to determine the
most effective Ms Pac-Man and ghosts controllers.
The organizers have created an efficient
implementation of the original Ms Pac-Man arcade
game in Java. The controllers nterface directly with
the game engine. All controllers submitted will be
pitted against one another. The goal for Ms Pac-Man
is to maximise the game's score (by eating pills,
powerpills and ghosts) while ghosts should try to
minimise the game's score (by eating Ms Pac-Man).
The Ms Pac-Man program Maastricht won the competition at the CIG 2012 and finished second at the WCCI 2012.
Key Publications:
- Pepels, T., Winands, M.H.M., and Lanctot, M. (2014). Real-time Monte-Carlo Tree Search in Ms Pac-Man. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, Vol. 6, No. 3., pp. 245-257.
- Pepels, T. and Winands, M.H.M. (2012). Enhancements for Monte-Carlo Tree Search in Ms Pac-Man. In 2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2012), pp. 265-272. IEEE. Nominated for the Best Paper Award.
