Design and Development of a Software Controller for the Ms. PacMan Game

Abstract

The Ms. Pac-Man vs. Ghosts is an arcade video game developed at 1982 and is currently used for an artificial Intelligence research proposal. The Ms. Pac-man vs. Ghosts league, an organization holding competition among different AI controllers, provides a Java platform of the game for AI controller development. The evaluation of the controller's performance uses the number of stages of the game cleared by the controller as the measurement of efficiency. To achieve the goal of clearing more stages, the tactics of the Pac-man must achieve the following objectives: earning more scores to earn bonus lives, and avoiding being captured of the ghosts. Based on study of existing controllers in the old version of the game platform, it's noticed that the AI tactics can be improved by considering the Pac-man's appropriately reactions under different conditions, so the new controller updated the old controller based on past version of platform and achieves tactics flexibilities by adapting different behavior under different relative positions between Pac-man and Ghosts. The experiment result shows a remarkable improvement in the performance evaluation.