Attack and Defense agent for the Pacman intrauniversities contest (Best ranking: 11th place out of 32)
| **Name | GitHub |
|---|---|
Roberta |
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Nazanin |
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The Eutopia Pacman contest is an activity consisting of a multiplayer capture-the-flag variant of Pacman, where agents control both Pacman and ghosts in coordinated team-based strategies. Students from different EUTOPIA universities compete with each other through their programmed agents. The project is based on the material from the CS188 course Introduction to Arti cial Intelligence at Berkeley2, which was extended for the AI course in 2017 by lecturer Prof. Sebastian Sardina at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) and Dr. Nir Lipovetzky at University of Melbourne (UoM)3. UPF has refactored the RMIT and UoM code. All the source code is written in Python.
2.1 Layout: The Pacman map is now divided into two halves: blue (right) and red (left). Red agents (which all have even indices) must defend the red food while trying to eat the blue food. When on the red side, a red agent is a ghost. When crossing into enemy territory, the agent becomes a Pacman.
2.2 Scoring: As a Pacman eats food dots, those food dots are stored up inside of that Pacman and removed from the board. When a Pacman returns to his side of the board, he \deposits" the food dots he is carrying, earning one point per food pellet delivered. Red team scores are positive, while Blue team scores are negative. If Pacman is eaten by a ghost before reaching his own side of the board, he will explode into a cloud of food dots that will be deposited back onto the board.
2.3 Eating Pacman: When a Pacman is eaten by an opposing ghost, the Pacman returns to its starting position (as a ghost). No points are awarded for eating an opponent.
2.4 Power Capsules: If Pacman eats a power capsule, agents on the opposing team become \scared" for the next 40 moves, or until they are eaten and respawn, whichever comes sooner. Agents that are \scared" are susceptible while in the form of ghosts (i.e. while on their own team's side) to being eaten by Pacman. Speci cally, if Pacman collides with a \scared" ghost, Pacman is una�ected and the ghost respawns at its starting position (no longer in the \scared" state).
2.5 Observations: Agents can only observe an opponent's con guration (position and direction) if they or their teammate is within 5 squares (Manhattan distance). In addition, an agent always gets a noisy distance reading for each agent on the board, which can be used to approximately locate unobserved opponents.
2.6 Winning: A game ends when one team returns all but two of the opponents' dots. Games are also limited to 1200 agent moves (300 moves per each of the four agents). If this move limit is reached, whichever team has returned the most food wins. If the score is zero (i.e., tied) this is recorded as a tie game.
2.7 Computation Time: We will run your submissions on the UPF cluster, SNOW. Tournaments will generate many processes that have to be executed without overloading the system. Therefore, each agent has 1 second to return each action. Each move which does not return within one second will incur a warning. After three warnings, or any single move taking more than 3 seconds, the game is forfeit. There will be an initial start-up allowance of 15 seconds (use the registerInitialState function). If your agent times out or otherwise throws an exception, an error message will be present in the log les, which you can download from the results page.