Ms. PacMan in IEEE Transactions on CI and AI in Games

Our fans and followers must be happy! ;D

They can now access the excellent work by Federico Liberatore in IEEE ToCIAIG journal.

This is the best journal concerning Artificial Intelligence in games, with a very strict reviewing process, so, we are very proud of this success. ;)

This is the next step in the research started one year and a half ago designing competitive  Ghost Teams for catching Ms. PacMan.

The abstract is:

In the last year, thanks to the Ms. Pac-Man vs Ghosts competition, the game of Ms. Pac-Man has gained increasing attention from academics in the field of Computational Intelligence. In this work, we contribute to this research stream by presenting a simple Genetic Algorithm with Lexicographic Ranking (GALR) for the optimization of Flocking Strategy-based ghost controllers. Flocking Strategies are a paradigm for intelligent agents characterized by showing emergent behavior and for having very little computational and memory requirements, making them well suited for commercial applications and mobile devices. In particular, we study empirically the effect of optimizing homogeneous and heterogeneous teams. The computational analysis shows that the Flocking Strategy-based controllers generated by the proposed GALR outperform the ghost controllers included in the competition framework and some of those presented in the literature.

The paper can be found here: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=7093170&tag=1

Enjoy it!

(And cite us) :D

Evolving Evil: Optimizing Flocking Strategies through Genetic Algorithms for the Ghost Team in the Game of Ms. Pac-Man

by Federico Liberatore, Antonio Mora, Pedro Castillo, Juan Julián Merelo in EvoGAMES

Flocking strategies are sets of behavior rules for the interaction of agents that allow to devise controllers with reduced complexity that generate emerging behavior. In this paper, we present an application of genetic algorithms and flocking strategies to control the Ghost Team in the game Ms. Pac-Man. In particular, we define flocking strategies for the Ghost Team and optimize them for robustness with respect to the stochastic elements of the game and effectivity against different possible opponents by means of genetic algorithm. 
The performance of the methodology proposed is tested and compared with that of other standard controllers belonging to the framework of the Ms. Pac-Man versus Ghosts Competition. The results show that flocking strategies are capable of modelling complex behaviors and produce effective and challenging agents. 

The presentation is:

 

You can also see a brief demo here (we are the ghosts :D):

Enjoy it!

(And cite us, of course :D)