AI Taught How To Play Ms. Pac-Man

trogador writes with the news that researchers are working to teach AIs how to play games as an exercise in reinforced learning. Software constructs have been taught to play games like chess and checkers since the 50s, but the Department of Information Systems at Eotvos University in Hungary is working to adapt that thinking to more modern titles. Besides Ms. Pac-Man, game like Tetris and Baldur's Gate assist these programs in mapping different behaviors onto their artificial test subjects. "Szita and Lorincz chose Ms. Pac-Man for their study because the game enabled them to test a variety of teaching methods. In the original Pac-Man, released in 1979, players must eat dots, avoid being eaten by four ghosts, and score big points by eating flashing ghosts. Therefore, a player's movements depend heavily on the movements of ghosts. However, the ghosts' routes are deterministic, enabling players to find patterns and predict future movements. In Ms. Pac-Man, on the other hand, the ghosts' routes are randomized, so that players can't figure out an optimal action sequence in advance."

Re:Bad idea

[GroeFaZ]

The good part is, computers are several orders of magnitude more efficient at wasting time than humans.

One of these things is not like the other...

[roystgnr]

The new AI game playing routines can handle Ms. Pacman, Tetris, and Baldur's Gate. Can their mathematics routines find sums of integers, roots of quadratics, and proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem?

Other uses

[TheSpengo]

This is cool, being able to choose smart moves against a random opponent could have a lot of uses in enemy AI in other games too. The unpredictability of a human opponent has always been an issue when creating realistic AI. It always kind of bugged me that even in new advanced games like Crysis, enemies will sometimes move in the most stupid ways possible. The next generation of FPS AI could use something similar to this.

Re:"AI"s tend to be overhyped

[bunratty]

I think you're referring to general or strong AI, which hasn't been developed yet. All we have now is weak AI, which even when it seems to demonstrate "learning", all it's really doing is running mechanical search algorithms and heuristics really, really fast.