Original subtitles

So you may have heard of Pacman. Has anybody heard of Pacman?

No, maybe a little bit, okay.

Pacman is a great game from the eighties. It's a trademark of

Namco Bandai and we're going to be using it throughout this course to illustrate points in

this educational setting. You can think of Pacman as an agent.

So, here, you look at this board. That's the Pacman board. What are the percepts?

What do you have when you play Pacman? So essentially Pacman the agent is not the game,

it's not something that draws the walls. What is it? It's the thing behind the joystick.

What's that?

It's you. So essentially you're the agent when you play a game of Pacman. You're deciding,

do I go up down left right, and so on, and what is your sensation? So what is the--

for you it involves your eyes, but basically you see the whole board.

You know where the dots are, you know where the enemies are, you know where the walls are. What actions can you take?

Well you can go up or down or left or right, and so if we have an agent

which maps the state of the board to up-down-left-right, the question is,

what goes here in the question mark that lets it know when to eat a dot, when to run away

from a ghost, when to use the power pellet. How are these decisions all made?

And you might think, I know, if the dot's next to me I eat it and if the

ghost is within three squares of me, run away. And if you try to write this down,

first of all you would end up with the

biggest mess of if-then statements you've ever seen, and then it wouldn't work.

We will in our projects get a chance to build agents for games like this, and

you'll see why that kind of thing doesn't work.

Alright, let's take a look at

an agent

for Pacman.

So here is an agent playing the game of Pacman. This is a CS 188

Pacman-like game

and I'll let you watch. As you watch I want you to think about what kinds of

computation must be going on in this agent in order to be able to

exhibit this range of behavior.

So we're gonna figure out in the coming classes how we'll be able

to give rise to behavior like that.