Pac-Man Recreated by Nvidia’s AI

Nvidia is commonly known to be a computer game company responsible for creating graphics processing units that make games visually appealing. What the company is less known for is that it also conducts research on artificial intelligence.

For its latest project, Nvidia researchers taught an AI system to recreate the game of Pac-Man simply by watching it being played.

There’s no coding involved, no pre-rendered images for the software to draw on. The AI model is simply fed visual data of the game in action along with the accompanying controller inputs and then recreates it frame by frame from this information. The resulting game is playable by humans, and Nvidia says it will be releasing it online in the near future.

While the AI has only made a blurry version of the video game, and was unable to capture the personality of each ghost, it was able to deduce the basic mechanics of the game, such as Pac-Man having to eat pellets while avoiding ghosts.

Nvidia says work like this shows how artificial intelligence will be used for game design in the future. Developers can input their work into the AI and use it to create variations or maybe design new levels. “You could use this to mash different games together,” Sanja Fidler, director of Nvidia’s Toronto research lab, told journalists, “giving additional power to games developers by [letting them] blend together different games.”