Nvidia
If you watched 50,000 games of Pac-Man, you’d probably be pretty good at drawing out what you saw. Nvidia’s GameGAN artificial intelligence (AI), however, was able to recreate the classic dot-chomping game for its 40th birthday from scratch without a traditional game engine in a matter of days.
Researchers from the graphics-chip maker’s AI Research Lab in Toronto used the company’s DGX systems to train the GameGan neural networks on 50,000 Pac-Man episodes combined with keystroke data of an AI agent playing the game as well as research data from game-developer Bandai Namco.
Once trained, the GameGAN model generated static elements such as maze shape and dots in addition to moving elements like the infamous Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde ghosts and, of course, Pac-Man itself. It also learned all the key game rules like what happens when Pac-Man gobbles a Power Pellet or teleports from one side of the screen to the other.
