Overview
The Pac-Man projects were developed for UC Berkeley's introductory artificial intelligence course, CS 188. They apply an array of AI techniques to playing Pac-Man. However, these projects don't focus on building AI for video games. Instead, they teach foundational AI concepts, such as informed state-space search, probabilistic inference, and reinforcement learning. These concepts underly real-world application areas such as natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. We designed these projects with three goals in mind. The projects allow students to visualize the results of the techniques they implement. They also contain code examples and clear directions, but do not force students to wade through undue amounts of scaffolding. Finally, Pac-Man provides a challenging problem environment that demands creative solutions; real-world AI problems are challenging, and Pac-Man is too. In our course, these projects have boosted enrollment, teaching reviews, and student engagement. The projects have been field-tested, refined, and debugged over multiple semesters at Berkeley. We are now happy to release them to other universities for educational use.