Development of a program for MS Pac-man Competition (Independent Project I)

Abstract

In this project, a programmed controller for Ms. Pac-Man game is designed. To achieve high scores in the game, this controller drives the Ms. Pac-Man to clear away as many pills as it can and avoid being killed by the four ghosts. In this implementation, screen capturing technique is used and an interface is constructed to gather required game board information. Moreover, conditions and weighting rules are set up in the algorithm to assign a score to each of the four directions of the Ms. Pac-Man and perform immediate actions. The average score is 3994 in thirty games while the standard deviation and the best mark are approximately 1839 and 9440 respectively. For comparison, the average score was about 5077 among all teams in IEEE WCCI 2008 Ms. Pac-Man Competition.