Entries
There were 5 entries submitted by the deadline of September 14, 2007.
The descriptions of each one can be found below:
- Manuel Loth
- Abbas Mehrabian and Arian Khosravi
- Pantea Jabbary and Elnaz Nouri
- Nicholas Wirth and Marcus Gallagher
- Hisashi Handa and Maiko Isozaki
The Loth entry required Linux, together with an installation of the MAME emulator, and we were unable to run it in time for the conference.
The others ran on Windows, and used either the MS Windows or Web Pacman versions of the game.
Results
Ten runs each were made of all the entries apart from Manual Loth's.
Unfortunately, the Mehrabian and Khosravi entry failed to operate properly on my laptop, so the spreadsheet shows only the default entry plus the three others (Elno = Jabbary and Nouri).
After the conference, however, M+K supplied a newer version of their software that worked well on many runs, scoring over 17,000 on several occasions, which would have easily won on the day.
This shows that based on these runs, none of the entries were able to outperform the default toolkit (supplied on this web site prior to the conference).
The competition was run live at a CEC 2007, using the default entry, and the entries by Wirth and Gallagher, and Handa and Isozaki (these were the entrants who attended the conference, and would have been eligible to claim the $500 prize).
These scored as follows for their allotted three runs each:
Unfortunately, the default toolkit scored higher than these on it's first attempt, and so the prize went unclaimed for this conference
Best Score Yet
The best score yet of any agent that I've run on my machine is:
20640 (Mehrabian and Khosravi)
Follow-Up
There has been a great deal of interest and enthusiasm for this competition, and it will run again for IEEE WCCI 2008.
Two versions of the Ms. Pac Man will be run for IEEE CIG 2008: the screen-capture version (described here), and also modified version where people can enter either a Pac-Man agent or a team of ghosts. More of this later...
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