Ms Pac-Man versus Ghost Team CEC 2011 competition

Games provide an ideal test bed for computational intelligence and significant progress has been made in recent years, most notably in games such as Go, where the level of play is now competitive with expert human play on smaller boards. Recently, a significantly more complex class of games has received increasing attention: real-time video games. These games pose many new challenges, including strict time constraints, simultaneous moves and open-endedness. Unlike in traditional board games, computational play is generally unable to compete with human players. One driving force in improving the overall performance of artificial intelligence players are game competitions where practitioners may evaluate and compare their methods against those submitted by others and possibly human players as well. In this paper we introduce a new competition based on the popular arcade video game Ms Pac-Man: Ms Pac-Man versus Ghost Team. The competition, to be held at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2011 for the first time, allows participants to develop controllers for either the Ms Pac-Man agent or for the Ghost Team and unlike previous Ms Pac-Man competitions that relied on screen capture, the players now interface directly with the game engine. In this paper we introduce the competition, including a review of previous work as well as a discussion of several aspects regarding the setting up of the game competition itself. © 2011 IEEE

Ms. Pac-Man Versus Ghost Team CIG 2016 competition

This paper introduces the revival of the popular Ms. Pac-Man Versus Ghost Team competition. We present an updated game engine with Partial Observability constraints, a new Multi-Agent Systems approach to developing Ghost agents, and several sample controllers to ease the development of entries. A restricted communication protocol is provided for the Ghosts, providing a more challenging environment than before. The competition will debut at the IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games Conference 2016. Some preliminary results showing the effects of Partial Observability and the benefits of simple communication are also presented

Single- versus Multiobjective Optimization for Evolution of Neural Controllers in Ms. Pac-Man

The objective of this study is to focus on the automatic generation of game artificial intelligence (AI) controllers for Ms. Pac-Man agent by using artificial neural network (ANN) and multiobjective artificial evolution. The Pareto Archived Evolution Strategy (PAES) is used to generate a Pareto optimal set of ANNs that optimize the conflicting objectives of maximizing Ms. Pac-Man scores (screen-capture mode) and minimizing neural network complexity. This proposed algorithm is called Pareto Archived Evolution Strategy Neural Network or PAESNet. Three different architectures of PAESNet were investigated, namely, PAESNet with fixed number of hidden neurons (PAESNet_F), PAESNet with varied number of hidden neurons (PAESNet_V), and the PAESNet with multiobjective techniques (PAESNet_M). A comparison between the single- versus multiobjective optimization is conducted in both training and testing processes. In general, therefore, it seems that PAESNet_F yielded better results in training phase. But the PAESNet_M successfully reduces the runtime operation and complexity of ANN by minimizing the number of hidden neurons needed in hidden layer and also it provides better generalization capability for controlling the game agent in a nondeterministic and dynamic environment

A Survey of Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods

Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a recently proposed search method that combines the precision of tree search with the generality of random sampling. It has received considerable interest due to its spectacular success in the difficult problem of computer Go, but has also proved beneficial in a range of other domains. This paper is a survey of the literature to date, intended to provide a snapshot of the state of the art after the first five years of MCTS research. We outline the core algorithm's derivation, impart some structure on the many variations and enhancements that have been proposed, and summarize the results from the key game and nongame domains to which MCTS methods have been applied. A number of open research questions indicate that the field is ripe for future work

Deep learning for video game playing

In this article, we review recent Deep Learning advances in the context of how they have been applied to play different types of video games such as first-person shooters, arcade games, and real-time strategy games. We analyze the unique requirements that different game genres pose to a deep learning system and highlight important open challenges in the context of applying these machine learning methods to video games, such as general game playing, dealing with extremely large decision spaces and sparse rewards

Artificial intelligence in co-operative games with partial observability

This thesis investigates Artificial Intelligence in co-operative games that feature Partial Observability. Most video games feature a combination of both co-operation, as well as Partial Observability. Co-operative games are games that feature a team of at least two agents, that must achieve a shared goal of some kind. Partial Observability is the restriction of how much of an environment that an agent can observe. The research performed in this thesis examines the challenge of creating Artificial Intelligence for co-operative games that feature Partial Observability. The main contributions are that Monte-Carlo Tree Search outperforms Genetic Algorithm based agents in solving co-operative problems without communication, the creation of a co-operative Partial Observability competition promoting Artificial Intelligence research as well as an investigation of the effect of varying Partial Observability to Artificial Intelligence, and finally the creation of a high performing Monte-Carlo Tree Search agent for the game Hanabi that uses agent modelling to rationalise about other players