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What makes Ms. Pac Man so hard for AI?

Its indeterminate because the ghosts turn in random directions with no preserve patterns. Notice Go, Chess, etc all are determinant.

This paper gives an overview of the background: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~mit/Papers/AAAI10a.pdf

I'm not sure it's hard in general but deepmind's program didn't do well because it couldn't plan ahead https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535446/googles-ai-masters...

It's also inferring the game state from looking at the screen rather than being spoonfed the data.

One could conceivably perform a depth-limited search on the actual game state if it were available and then use an AlphaGo-like DNN to predict what a deeper search would find, no?

Dunno really. A human would watch the ghosts behaviour and guess their likely future behaviours based on that. I'm not sure if the software gets that, as it were, or how you'd tweak it to do so.

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