PAC-MAN turns 40 and receives a makeover made by an AI

The famous PAC-MAN game is 40 years old, and Nvidia and Bandai Namco are celebrating the anniversary by rebuilding the game using artificial intelligence.

Nvidia researchers trained an AI model called Nvidia GameGAN, on 50,000 PAC-MAN episodes and produced a fully functional version without the help of a game engine.

GameGAN is the first neural network that mimics a game engine by using an adversarial generative network.

Composed of two competing neural networks, a generator and a discriminator, GAN-based models learn to create new content compelling enough to pass as original.

This technology could automatically generate plans for game levels, but can also be used to develop simulation systems to train autonomous machines, where AI can learn the rules of an environment before interacting with objects in the real world.