Some recent news published by NVIDIA’s artificial intelligence research group reports that a new AI model succeeded in recreating the classic PAC-MAN arcade game from the ground up, entirely on its own.

The AI system developed by the folks at NVIDIA goes by the name GameGAN, and drew on the power of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to mimic the game engine of PAC-MAN and thus recreate it. GANs are kinds of machine learning algorithms which can produce really authentic new examples of, say, photographs (and now video games), based on an existing dataset thereof. The products look convincingly similar to the original - and could in fact pass for the original - despite still being specifically different from it.

Another AI tool also developed by NVIDIA - the StyleGAN2 - also makes use of GANs, but specifically as a pretty much instantaneous method of producing an infinite collection of images. That kind of thing could quite possibly revolutionize image generation as we know it, so could NVIDIA’s GameGAN revolutionize the creation of video games too?

Well, we can certainly say that what GameGAN has done is pretty ground-breaking in the field of AI research. It’s the first demonstration of an AI model creating a computer programme – in this case a video game – from scratch, all on its own. And literally, all it had to do to accomplish this was “observe” some gameplay of PAC-MAN. From that and only that, GameGAN could build all aspects of the game - programming and all - on its own. Granted, it had to watch 50,000 episodes of gameplay footage first, but that’s still super impressive.

“We wanted to see whether the AI could learn the rules of an environment just by looking at the screenplay of an agent moving through the game. And it did,” said Seung-Wook Kim, who led the GameGAN project at NVIDIA.

It’s pretty mind-blowing, really. And the folks at Bandai Namco - PAC-MAN’s publisher - also seem similarly impressed. As Koichiro Tsutsumi from the research development branch of Bandai Namco expresses:

Source: NVIDIA

We were blown away when we saw the results, in disbelief that AI could recreate the iconic PAC-MAN experience without a game engine.

This research presents exciting possibilities to help game developers accelerate the creative process of developing new level layouts, characters and even games.