Three students at the University of Essex, Philipp Rohlfshagen, David Robles, and Simon Lucas, built an AI that can play Ms. Pac-Man like a champeen, hitting 70,000 points in a few minutes thanks to forward-thinking algortithms. It’s actually quite fascinating to watch the AI in action as it hovers over various dots and decides whether or not to take certain tunnels.
The project was part of an evolutionary computing conference and pitted game player AIs with enemy ghost AIs written by other participants. You can download game code below.