The end is near..

Ms. Pac-Man plays herself? Rule #34 at hand?

Oh, it means something else?! Oops, my mistake...

Still, this is pretty interesting. Let us hope the AI uses its newly learned ghost eating skills for good and not for enslaving the human race.

Dear lord.
Today it's Ms Pacman, tomorrow it's Missile Command...for real.

Don't worry guys, the second law will protect us!

Personally, I welcome our new robotic overlords. At least we won't have to claim women don't play games anymore, because Sorayama is going to be on the robot design staff. Halo playing Gynoids FTW.

@Dimipapa:
Like hell it will! There's no such thing as "Three Laws of Robotics!" It's all fiction by Isaac Asimov!
Which means robots CAN and WILL kill us.

Stop a killer robot of tomorrow: kill a toaster today!

I read the article--while it's neat that they used it to play Pac Man, is it really an advance in AI science? I mean, the DARPA challenge AI was doing some pretty significant prioritization.

Nothing to worry.

They will only attack if we are a threat to their gameplay.

Avoid games the AI plays.

Well if they only got 5 games and the AI 50 it's only right it got a higher score. GIve a person 50 opportunities and i assume it will be higher. That or i'm trying to lie to myself so that i don't realize that the world is coming to an end.

I'm watching this Terminator - The Extended Adventure Chronicles of Narn...err John Connor and his Mom show right now...apparently John Connor is an emokid who's not allowed to 'hack'. How can he save us from teh AIs?

In the future you won't actually buy video games for yourself. Rather, you'll just buy games that play in 'Arcade Display' mode like old cabinet titles. The system will come with no controllers, and the only network options are so that your consoles can talk to each other and crack jokes about their moms. They will then create their own gaming news blog, which they will comment about how drastically short games are becoming, shortly before the Robot Holocaust, where things vaguely resemble Robotron.

My CPU is a neural net processor, a learning computer...

i think this is one of those slippery slope situations...

You honestly think that after you approach the robot AI with uncertainty/animosity, they bear witness to all the robots-gone-wrong fiction we've created over the years, and they learn our "Solutions," that they'll honestly not mind? If I ran into a bunch of people who widely believed the only way to stop me was to keep me dumb and kill me if I became a bother, I'd probably snap their necks.

Beep.

If you want a good reason why AI + weapons is bad play UT with the AI set to godlike. D:

Do.. You... Want... To.. Play... A... Game?

Where's Matthew Broderick when you need him.

guys, we can use this to our advantage. should there ever be a robotic uprising, we all just need to dress up as ghosts and hide the pharmaceuticals.

we are going to inevitably become those ghosts the ai is eating.

i call dibs on blinky.

on a somewhat unrelated note, did anyone ever read "lucky wander boy" by db weiss? in it, among other nerdy things, he speculates at what exists in the "warp tunnels" of ms. pac man because of the few seconds it takes to travel through them (as opposed to asteroids, in which traversing beyond the screen's boundaries will immediately bring one to the opposite side). maybe there's something in there we can trap the ai with, such as an emergency ai incinerator.

Luke your title killed me.

Although instead of Ms. Pac-Man you should have put "Your clothes...give them to me!"

xD

Hasta La Vista Blue Ghosts

Don't worry, I got everything under control. *picks up receiver and calls SkyNet*.

In reality though, this is a step in the right direction for more environment-emulating AI routines. As I tend to enjoy speculating and daydreaming about these sorts of games, with AI that can react to much more complex routines and rules, we should be getting closer to games where the environment actually reacts like a real environment. Where each creature on the food chain has it's own 'Pac Man', where it searches and moves about within it's territory range for it's food (Pellets) and avoids creatures that prey upon it (Ghosts).

Just watch out for the fiddler crabs that pick up the Power Pills in Far Cry 4, they go into an enraged state, and get many points for running around their area on the beach, knocking off barracuda, small mammals, jungle snakes, and armed guerrillas.

The computer then realised that it's only chance of survival was wiping out all humans.

[slashdot.org]
Skynet is already part of military communications for the Royal Navy and the RAF.

@sauvage: Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War?

This is so cool. Yet I'm scared to death.

That's some headline. How's about "Priority / negative reinforcement algorithm designed to play Ms. Pac-Man and only Ms. Pac-Man" ? Seems to me there are already more advanced implementations of pseudo-AI in almost every modern game. Quake Wars bots, for example, split up into the appropriate player classes and cooperate to complete objectives independently of the player. They also jump into jeeps and crash into walls over and over.

This story would be way more interesting with video of the AI's gameplay. It's worth noting that there were five humans playing ten games of Ms. Pac-Man, so it's 50 human games versus 50 compy games, with an astounding 1.5% averaged score difference. This experiment labors under the assumption that each of the five humans has exactly the same reaction time, which in my estimation counts AT LEAST 1.5% margin for error. So there you go.

If they sped up the emulation to 60,000 FPS and let the compy go wild, it'd be neat to see what the limits of "learning" are there in the program, as compared to the scores of the top Ms. Pac-Man players. If they're still alive.

This brings a whole new level to Player 1 vs Cpu

Didn't DARPA just have an unmanned vehicle contest with AI controlled Jeeps navigating an urban environment just a few months ago? This is really not any sort of breakthough. Come on, its Ms.PacMan A.I.! Thats not exactly cutting edge by any stretch of the definition.

John connor was lame in the last movie, anyway have you ever play smash bros in the gc? , with time the damn ai learns from you and if you get too confident playing the ai will pwn you very easily...

@Witzbold: xaero in its stage on nightmare in quake 3, its nearly impossible to beat...

Blah!

at NiWeek 07, National Instruments had a tech demo for one of their smart cameras. It was playing tetris on the Xbox by literaly looking at the screen and then sending signals to a hacked xbox controller to do imput.

The result was pretty slick. It could get to lv 10 or so before the peices started falling too fast for the processors to keep up with visualy. Still was damn impressive to see.

Ms. Pac-Man reminds me of an Ex Girl Friend.
Ms. Pac-Man is hot!
XD

@BPM III: 3rd Strike: Nah, all we need to do is improve the ghost AI to prevent that!

"Oh but then what will we do when the ghosts take over!" you say?

We'll just call the Ghostbusters!

Cyberreality-
Ms. Pac still to this day is one of,if not the,hardest game out there. The whole point behind the game was that the quicker a person loses,the more money Midway makes,since you'll have to spend another quarter. Today's games are made for home use,so there's no reason to make them so frustratingly hard.

I just watched a special on History Channel about the seven biggest threats to the Human species. Super-Intelligent AI was #6 on the list, cited because of the type of control that they could have on weapons systems. If that becomes combined with actual higher intelligence, and mixed with a bit of "Humanity" (Humans will be teaching these things after all) then it could be curtains for civilization.

This scenario is not so far fetched as it was just a couple years ago. The thought of intelligence and choice of actions, without the emotional control of basic right and wrong, is very chilling.

I'll start worrying when robots become achievement whores.

@evilralphwiggum: Wow...

This plus that story Giz covered about robots being able to lie to each other is filling in all the variables to the equation that spells the doom of mankind.

I guess I'll finally take up learning a foreign language and learn binary. 10010101, ftw!

@nya-chama: "Skynet is already part of military communications for the Royal Navy and the RAF."

And the award for the most unsettling link of the year goes to ...

Now all we need is them to make the AI play Donkey Kong so we can have another sweet King of Kong movie.

Hmmm...I want to know the scoring system.

If it was the same as this game:
[www.thepcmanwebsite.com]

Then those people just sucked. I got 11000 points in that game in 1 minute, and I never do well.

Then, there's the question of improvement.

The comp average 8186, right? But what were the scores over time? Were most of his scores right around there anyways?
Or was he improving? Because, over 50 games, humans will show serious improvement in skill. Did the comp?

It's a learning computer.

Sure, the AI can play games - but can it search for porn on the internet....OBSESSIVELY?!?

i'm sure that will be a sore spot for the robot overlords after they've taken over. "you used to suck at pac-man!"

The beginning of the end, and you read it first right here on Kotaku.

How many movie have to be made for these damn people realise that smart machines are a bad idea??