University of Southern Maine

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USM Wins International Artificial Intelligence Competition

June 17, 2008

This spring, University of Southern Maine undergraduate Peter Kemeraitis, a computer technician at Mountain Valley High School in Rumford, and graduate student Alan Fitzgerald of Windham worked on an unusual research project with Assistant Professor of Computer Science Clare Bates Congdon. Lured by an international research competition and the challenge of a prize that went unclaimed last year, the three set out to develop an artificial intelligence program able to play the arcade game Ms. Pac-Man. The team competed at the World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI) in Hong Kong on June 3 and outperformed their 11 international opponents to take home the prize.  Kemeraitis was unable to attend the competition because of work commitments.

Ms. Pac-Man is a classic arcade game originally released in 1981. The game is more challenging than the better-known Pac-Man in that the actions of the ghosts' that destroy Ms. Pac-Man are random. Thus, the game is different each time it is played, and, unlike Pac-Man, a series of successful moves cannot be memorized.

In the WCCI competition, teams entered artificial intelligence programs -- called “agents” -- to play the game, much as a human would. Although it seems this would be an easy game for a computer agent to play, because of the unpredictable nature of the ghosts and the difficulties of perceiving the game board, none of the five entrants in the 2007 competition did well enough to claim the prize.

To win, a team has to beat the default entry that last year scored 3,810 points. USM’s team scored 15,400 points this year, well behind the human record of 921,360, but far ahead of the second-place team from Japan’s Okayama University that scored 11,320 points.

The USM team plans to participate in future competitions. Machine learning is Congdon's area of expertise in computer science, and the USM approach is designed to enable the agent to improve with experience. This type of research, she notes, has practical applications well beyond computerized video games.  “Artificial intelligence systems are seeing increasing use, ranging from manufacturing and military applications, to Mars explorers and entertainment.”

For more information, contact Clare Bates Congdon at congdon@gmail.com.

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