This competition allows you to develop AI controllers for the classical arcade game Ms Pac-Man. You can submit Java code for either Ms Pac-Man or for the ghosts! The competition is brought to you by Philipp Rohlfshagen and David Robles and Simon Lucas.
Submissions now open (beta stage). Register now and download the latest software here. Upload the starter packages straight away to get into the rankings.
Next deadline: May 27, 2012 (11:59 AM).
Ms Pac-Man, the classical arcade game from the 80's is one of the best-known video games ever made. In the Ms Pac-Man vs Ghosts competition you are asked to create computer programs (controllers) to play the game as either Ms Pac-Man or the ghosts. Your controller, which will have to provide a direction at every game tick (40 milliseconds), will then compete against all the controllers submitted by others in a round-robin style tournament to determine the most effective strategy. All coding is done in Java and you may submit controllers for both Ms Pac-Man and the four ghosts. In only takes a few minutes to get started (check out the quick starter guides) and you can submit as many controllers as you like prior to the deadline. Happy coding!
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This competition will run twice this year. The next deadline is May 27, 2012 (11.59am BST) and final results will be presented at WCCI 2012. The second iteration is to coincide with CIG 2012 and has a deadline of September 1, 2012 (11.59am BST).
We added a new topic to the forum to ask you for suggestions and feature requests for the next iteration of the competition. Please let us know your thoughts.
New version of the code has just been released. Unless there are still bugs, this will be the last update prior to the deadline.
The ability to upload reports (as pdf files) is now available as well.
We have made some further changes to the code and the website (rankings in particular) and hopefully have now ironed out all remaining bugs. We have restarted everything to make sure the results are correct. The lates code (minor changes only) will be released shortly.
We have decided to stick with the round-robin tournament style for now, changing to something more efficient after the deadline has passed (for the next competition). We will turn off submissions once the deadline has passed and run the final evaluation. Please note: any rankings prior to the deadline have no impact on the final rankings. These will be established independently.
We will also enable the uploading of reports in a few days. This is completely optional. We would appreciate it if you could include a brief description of your algorithm alongside your final submission. Submissions of reports will remain open after the deadline until the results are announced so you still have plenty of time to get these done.
After the results for the WCCI 2012 iteration have been announced, we will start submissions for the CIG 2012 iteration. All controllers will be carried over automatically. You will then have another chance to improve your code and climb up in the rankings. We hope this will not prevent you from publishing your source code (and report) - so please tick the box in your profile if you have not yet done so.
We think we have finally fixed the bug where a controller is disqualified with a '#' note. We are still testing but it seems to work now.
A new release of the software has just been released.
Sorry for the long delay but the new software is now ready for download. Since this is a major update, we won't install it on the server until May 8. So please let us know if you find any bugs. Thanks.
The combined rankings are back. Please let us know in the forums if you have new ideas for the scoring system.
We uploaded the code of the website to Github: https://github.com/drobles/pacvsghosts-website
If you would like to contribute please feel free to add tickets, or even better, submit pull requests. We'll also upload the code of the simulator once the next version is released.
New version of code now released. A few minor bug fixes and some feature requests. These do not affect the controllers.
Been through the forum and made note of all the suggestions. We have posted some answers already and are now working on the implementation of the fixes.
You may have noticed a slight lack of activity in the last two weeks. We were away at a conference but we are now back. We have started to work on the many suggestions posed in the forums - thanks to all who participate so actively, we appreciate it.
The game server is back up and running and submissions are open once again!
The game server will be down for the next four days (April 2-6) due to electrical work carried out at our university. We apologise for this. The website will remain fully functional so you can still look at the replays to improve your controllers. We will be back online as soon as possible.
In the meantime, we are working on the next minor update of the code: the next version will be more efficient to allow controllers to compute more in the time given for each move.
We are also working on a forum which will be available shortly. This forum can be used for all competition related aspects, including questions, bug fixes, rules, strategies, etc.
The server seems to run fine now. We have also updated the way errors are reported to provide more feedback. We are now in beta stage. That means we are expected far less problems than before but it is still possible that things might go wrong. As always, we will try our best to address any issues as quickly as possible.
We are having some issues with the game server at the moment - we hope to have this fixed as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.
To improve the performance of the website, now the Pacman and Ghosts rankings are generated every 5 minutes (instead of real-time). Also, we added a combined rankings page with a scoring system similar to the one used in Formula 1. Please let us know if you have any suggestions about the combined scoring system.
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Version 0.3 of the software has just been released with some minor additions and bug-fixes.
Ms Pac-man vs Ghosts Competition
