The Pac-Man Projects
Overview
These projects will allow you to consolidate the AI techniques you'll learn in class to play Pac-Man. These projects teach foundational AI concepts, such as informed state-space search, probabilistic inference, and reinforcement learning. These concepts underly real-world application areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics.
The projects allow you to visualize the results of the techniques you implement. They also contain code examples and clear directions, but do not force you to wade through undue amounts of scaffolding. Real-world AI problems are challenging and Pac-Man provides a challenging problem environment that demands creative solutions;
Projects Overview
This short UNIX/Python tutorial introduces students to the Python programming language and the UNIX environment.
Students implement depth-first, breadth-first, uniform cost, and A* search algorithms. These algorithms are used to solve navigation and traveling salesman problems in the Pacman world.
Students will apply the search algorithms and problems implemented in Project 1 to handle more difficult scenarios that include controlling multiple pacman agents and planning under time constraints
Classic Pacman is modeled as both an adversarial and a stochastic search problem. Students implement multiagent minimax and expectimax algorithms, as well as designing evaluation functions.
Students implement model-based and model-free reinforcement learning algorithms, applied to the AIMA textbook's Gridworld, Pacman, and a simulated crawling robot.
This minicontest involves a multiplayer capture-the-flag variant of Pacman, where agents control both Pacman and ghosts in coordinated team-based strategies. Each team will try to eat the food on the far side of the map, while defending the food on their home side.
Students implement the perceptron algorithm and neural network models, and apply the models to several tasks including digit classification.
Technical Notes
The Pac-Man projects are written in pure Python 3.6 and do not depend on any packages external to a standard Python distribution.
Credits
The projects were developed by John DeNero, Dan Klein, Pieter Abbeel, and many others.