Ms Packman played by AI!

Inspiration

I have wanted more work with machine learning and found this as an opportunity to do so. I have worked on similar projects, but Ms Packman is a much more complex game than what I had played and it took a different approach to get it working.

What it does

It takes the frame information from the Ms Packman game, simplifies and cleans the image, then feeds it into a neural network. The neural network will take a guess for movement based on the image. At the end of the game, when the 3 lives have been used up, it will use all of the frame information, guess information, and score information to fit the model / make it learn!

How we built it

We built it in a python jupyter notebook and used a research paper I wrote to start the code.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was finding the right resources to work with the version of python that had to be run for one of the libraries. The Open AI Gym library does not work well in the newest version of python and requires licenses to be obtained to run the ROM's. To circumvent these issues, python 3.7 was used because it was before these licenses were implemented.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the end result. The AI looks like it plays the game as a human would. Although it might not be the best right now, it has steadily grown and strengthened over the 1000 pieces of training it underwent. With time, we predict that it could go flawless in packman and play forever.

What we learned

We developed a more in-depth understanding of machine learning and gaming AI. We learned how to train a machine to get better at a certain problem, in this case it was the Ms Pacman game, and eventually, play the game itself. We also learned how to install various systems and use different libraries in python.

What's next for Ms Packman played by AI!

There is optimization in the neural net and the training that can be done to make it train faster. Also, I am going to let it train for a couple of nights and it should be able to flawless packman by then! I also want to update it to python 3.9 and obtain the proper licenses so I can play other atari games with the machine learning.

Built With

• jupyter
• keras
• pyth