AIPac - Evolving PacMan AI (Pac Man) / News: Recent posts

Added a console representation for the neural network.

Six years gone and I've just now gotten back into this. At this stage, I've only added a few things.

The most significant addition is to add on option to penalize the fitness by the number of links in the network. If PenalizeLinks is set to 1, then PacMan's score is divided by the number of links or connections between neurons in the network.

With the addition of PenalizeLinks, I thought it would be nice to see the number of links, so I added the number of links to the monitor window as well as the number of neurons. These are displayed for the best genome found thus far.... read more

v0.1.6 updates - January 2011
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A major bug that I had shelved and forgotten was fixed:
Occasionally (often) the program would hang and become non-responsive. This was found to be due to the way the gate of the ghost cage was controlled. With no ghosts or just one ghost, no problems, but with multiple ghosts the case in which ghosts were using the gate simultaneously led to the possibility that the gate would close while a ghost was part way through. This appears to be fixed now.... read more

Another set of updates with a few bug fixes and some aesthetic changes.

v0.1.5 updates
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Vector-based inputs implemented. Walls are input as a window. Pellet inputs provide a distance and angle to each power pellet, ghost inputs provide distance, angle, and state (-1 = hunting, 1 = blue) to each ghost, dot inputs show distance and angle to the centroid of all remaining dots. All vectors assume PacMan as the origin.... read more

v0.1.4 Updates
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A few bugs were fixed. Specifically, some issues with whether PowerPellets and Ghosts were visible or not were addressed.

The ability to ignore walls or dots was added to the Windowed AI. In the parameters file the following keywords control this as follows:

DotWallSingleInput - If set to 1, the input will be -1 for a wall, 0 if empty, and 1 for a dot. If set to 0, there will be two sets of inputs - one for dots one for walls.... read more

An updated set of files is now available. I have also restructured the downloads a bit to make it a little cleaner. Below is a list of the most recent updates.

v0.1.3 Updates
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Windows now update during the evolution step thus preventing significant freezing of the application during one epoch.

The console window now tells you whether PacMan will run or not after the current epoch and has (almost) instant feedback from pressing 'B'. The title bar of the console window (PacMan maze) states "Active" or "Sleeping" depending on the current state of the application.... read more

A new file has been uploaded to the downloads section. Under the Additional Details header, the PlainEnglish_README.txt file has a softer introduction and some explanations of what I'm trying to accomplish.

Some have asked whether it is possible to get PacMan to run through the maze. Initially, the application is set up with the PacMan maze window inactive. But, yes, you can opt to have the PacMan run after each generation using the best neural net thus far.

To get this to work, while one of the application's windows is activated (the PacMan game maze is probably the best), press the 'B' key. After the current evolutionary step, PacMan will become active. You can turn it off - go back to having PacMan not run - by pressing the 'B' key again.... read more

I have just uploaded code and executable packages that address a number of issues and include some extra functionalities.

Some users experienced crashes with the original release, and I believe that I have fixed this issue. Based on my tests the code is significantly more stable, but please let me know if you have any problems.

Additions:

A number of optimizations were made to allow the simulations to run faster.... read more

I changed the parameters file to provide a faster running application. The resulting AI may not be very interesting, but there will be more sensory feedback from the start. This may also alleviate some of the crash problems seen in the past, as there may be a problem with the input values in Windowed AI mode. I'm working on a fix, but for now...

The changes I made:

Switch the AI Mode from Windowed to Global. More details of the AI Mode are in various README files as well as in the parameters file itself.... read more

Some people have reported problems with the program crashing or just shutting down. If you have such a problem, please let me know through the forums. I am working now to implement logging in order to help troubleshooting.

9 April 2007 - AIPac uploaded and ready for abuse!