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

Predicting Dominance Rankings for Score-Based Games

Game competitions may involve different player roles and be score-based rather than win/loss based. This raises the issue of how best to draw opponents for matches in ongoing competitions, and how best to rank the players in each role. An example is the Ms Pac-Man versus Ghosts Competition which requires competitors to develop software controllers to take charge of the game's protagonists: participants may develop software controllers for either or both Ms Pac-Man and the team of four ghosts. In this paper, we compare two ranking schemes for win-loss games, Bayes Elo and Glicko. We convert the game into one of win-loss ("dominance") by matching controllers of identical type against the same opponent in a series of pair-wise comparisons. This implicitly creates a "solution concept" as to what a constitutes a good player. We analyze how many games are needed under two popular ranking algorithms, Glicko and Bayes Elo, before one can infer the strength of the players, according to our proposed solution concept, without performing an exhaustive evaluation. We show that Glicko should be the method of choice for online score-based game competitions

Automated Map Generation for the Physical Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper presents a method for generating complex problems that allow multiple nonobvious solutions for the physical traveling salesman problem (PTSP). PTSP is a single-player game adaptation of the classical traveling salesman problem that makes use of a simple physics model: the player has to visit a number of waypoints as quickly as possible by navigating a ship in real time across an obstacle-filled 2-D map. The difficulty of this game depends on the distribution of waypoints and obstacles across the 2-D plane. Due to the physics of the game, the shortest route is not necessarily the fastest, as the ship's momentum makes it difficult to turn sharply at high speed. This paper proposes an evolutionary approach to obtaining maps where the optimal solution is not immediately obvious. In particular, any optimal route for these maps should differ distinctively from: 1) the optimal distance-based TSP route and 2) the route that corresponds to always approaching the nearest waypoint first. To achieve this, the evolutionary algorithm covariance matrix adaptation-evolutionary strategy (CMA-ES) is employed, where maps, indirectly represented as vectors of real numbers, are evolved to differentiate maximally between a game-playing agent that follows two or more different routes. The results presented in this paper show that CMA-ES is able to generate maps that fulfil the desired conditions

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

Solving the Physical Traveling Salesman Problem: Tree Search and Macro Actions

This paper presents a number of approaches for solving a real-time game consisting of a ship that must visit a number of waypoints scattered around a 2-D maze full of obstacles. The game, the Physical Traveling Salesman Problem (PTSP), which featured in two IEEE conference competitions during 2012, provides a good balance between long-term planning (finding the optimal sequence of waypoints to visit), and short-term planning (driving the ship in the maze). This paper focuses on the algorithm that won both PTSP competitions: it takes advantage of the physics of the game to calculate the optimal order of waypoints, and it employs Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) to drive the ship. The algorithm uses repetitions of actions (macro actions) to reduce the search space for navigation. Variations of this algorithm are presented and analyzed, in order to understand the strength of each one of its constituents and to comprehend what makes such an approach the best controller found so far for the PTSP. © 2009-2012 IEEE

Molecular Algorithms for Evolutionary Computation

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