fairGhosts — Ant colony controlled ghosts for Ms. Pac-Man
A previously proposed ACO game agent controller for steering the ghosts in the computer game Ms. Pac-Man has been improved by reengineering and extending the original controller with an adapted ACO algorithm. The number of free parameters is reduced by 30% and their values are optimized using a genetic algorithm. The proposed new ACO controller, named “fairGhosts”, is tested against other available game agent controllers within the existing Ms. Pac-Man simulator framework. This controller reaches a performance comparable to the upper third of all proposed controllers. In certain cases, it beats even the best controllers. Our “fairGhost” algorithm, its implementation and functionality are discussed.
We have modeled the AntSim case study for the GraBats 2008 tool contest with the Fujaba tool. It turned out that for this problem the moving of single ants is the most frequent operation. The execution time for this operation dominates the overall execution time. This paper will report how we addressed the move ant problem using dedicated Fujaba features and which performance we have achieved.