Pac-Man turns 40 today, and even though the days of quarter-munching arcade machines in hazy bars are long behind us, the legendary game’s still helping to push the industry forward. On Friday, Nvidia announced that its researchers have trained an AI to create working Pac-Man games without teaching it about the game’s rules or giving it access to an underlying game engine. Nvidia’s “GameGAN� simply watched 50,000 Pac-Man games to learn the ropes.
That’s an impressive feat in its own right, but Nvidia hopes the “generative adversarial network� (GAN) technology underpinning the project can be used in the future to help developers create games faster and train autonomous robots.