Neuroevolution of Multimodal Ms. Pac-Man Controllers Under Partially Observable Conditions

Ms. Pac-Man is a well-known video game used extensively in AI research. Past research has focused on the standard, fully observable version of Ms. Pac-Man. Recently, a partially observable variant of the game has been used in the Ms. Pac-Man Vs. Ghost Team Competition at the Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) conference. Restricting Ms. Pac-Man's view makes the game more challenging. Ms. Pac-Man can only see down halls within her direct line of sight. The approach to this domain presented in this paper extends an earlier approach using MM-NEAT, an algorithm for evolving modular neural networks. Experiments using several forms of evolved and human-specified modularity are presented. The best evolved agent uses a human-specified task division with output modules for different situations: no ghosts, edible ghosts, and threat ghosts. This approach placed first at the Ms. Pac-Man Vs. Ghost Team Competition at CIG 2018 against seven other competitors with an average score of 7736.63.