Tag Archive for 'Artificial Intelligence'

PacMan capture-the-flag: a fun game for artificial intelligence development and education

Published
by
pietro
on September 12, 2009
in Artificial Intelligence, Education, PacMan capture-the-flag and Python
. 0 Comments

At the beginning of September I’ve been invited to teach at a summer school about scientific programming. The whole experience has been really rewarding, but it was the student’s project that got me going: we had the students write artificial intelligence algorithms for the agents of a PacMan-like game, and organized a tournament for them to compete against each other.

The PacMan capture-the-flag game has been written originally by John DeNero, and has been used to teach an artificial intelligence course by him at Berkley and by Hal Daume III at University of Utah. Very often, this kind of games have a single strategy that dominates all others, and once you find it the interest fizzles out. In this case, I was impressed by how rich this game is. The game offers a lot of opportunities to develop and test complex learning and planning algorithms, including cooperation strategies for games with multiple agents.

capture_the_flag

The rules of the game are quite simple: the board is a PacMan maze, divided in a red and a blue half. The two halves belong to two teams of agents, who are controlled by computer programs to eat the opponent’s food and protect their own. When in the opponent’s half, the agents are PacMan (PacMen?), while in their own half, the agents are ghosts and can kill the opponent’s PacMan agents, in which case these are returned to their initial position. The players get one point for each food dot they eat; no points are assigned for eating the other team’s agents. The game ends when one of the two teams eats all of the opponent’s food, or after 3000 moves; the team with the highest score wins.

To make the game more interesting, one can only observe the position of the other team’s agents when they are very close to one’w own agents (5 squares away); otherwise, one can only obtain a noisy estimate of their distance.

The game is written in Python, my programming language of choice, which allows to write rapidly even sophisticated algorithms. I recommend the game to anyone wanting to organize an artificial intelligence course, or simply have fun writing AI agents. I plan to dedicate a couple of posts to the basic strategies to write successful agents in this game.

Here’s a video of the best students’ agents (red team) playing against the best tutors’ agents (blue team). The tutors won, saving our reputation!

Update: The authors of the PacMan capture-the-flag game decided to keep the game close-source, and in particular would prefer not to publish the code of agents playing their game, fearing that it might interfere with their course. It’s a shame because I was planning to write some Genetic Programming agents for the game, but of course I respect their decision. I guess there will be no series of posts re:PacMan…

My AI reads your mind and kicks your ass (part 2)

Published
by
pietro
on May 3, 2009
in ActionScript 3, Artificial Intelligence and Flash
. 1 Comment
Get Adobe Flash player

In the last post I discussed how it is possible to program a game Artificial Intelligence to exploit a player’s unconscious biases using a simple mathematical model. In the karate game above, the AI uses that model in order to do the largest amount of damage. Give it a try! You get 10 points if you hit your opponent with a punch or a kick, 0 points if you miss, and 5 points if you block your opponent’s move. As you play, the AI learns your strategy and adapts to knock you down as often as possible.

How does it work? According to decision theory, we need to maximize the expected score. To compute the expected score for an action ‘x’ (e.g., ‘punch’), one needs to consider all possible player’s moves, ‘y’, and weight the possible outcome with the probability of the player doing that move, i.e.

E[score for x] = sum_y P(y) * Score(y,x)

where P(y) is the probability of the player choosing action ‘y’ (obtained using last post’s model), and Score(y,x) gives the score of responding ‘x’ to ‘y’.

For example, in the karate game using a low kick has a priori the highest chance of success: you score in 3 out of 4 cases, and only lose 5 points if the opponent decides to block your kick. This is why, at the beginning, the AI tends to choose that move. However, if you know that the AI uses that move often, you will choose the kick-blocking move more often, increasing P(kick-block). This change will make the punch more likely to score points. As you play, the optimal strategy changes and the AI continues to adapt to your style.

With a bit of practice, you’ll notice that you can compete with the AI and sometimes even gain the upper hand over it. This shows that you are in turn forming an internal model of the computer’s strategy. I think that the game dynamics that results from this interaction makes the game quite interesting, even though it is extremely simple. Unfortunately, it’s very rare to see learning AIs in real-life video games…

As always, you can download the code here.

Update: Instead of always making the best move, the AI now selects the move with a probability related to its score, which makes it less predictable. More details in the next post…