IT097IU - Lab01 - Solved

The Pac-Man World  

 

 

Step 1: Download Code  
The code you will be using can be downloaded as a zip archive on Blackboard, namely Lab1- Designing Pac-Man Agents.

Extract the files into a directory/folder on your computer. A folder called, search will be created and in it you will find several dozen files. To ensure that you have a working version of the files, run the following command:  

python pacman.py  

You should see a game screen pop up (see Figure 1). This is a basic Pac-Man game. In the game, you control the movements of Pac-Man using arrow keys on your keyboard. Go ahead and try it.  

The Pac-Man world is laid out as corridors (with shiny blue walls) where Pac-Man can move about. Little white pellets are sometimes littered throughout the corridors. This is food for PacMan (larger pellets are power food or capsules, try and figure out what those are for). In the world shown in Figure 1, PacMan has adversaries: colored ghosts that eat Pac-Man when it runs into them. Ghosts move about without eating any food. When Pac-Man is eaten, it dies and the game ends. The screen will disappear.  

                 

Step 2: Pac-Man Agent  
In this and the next few assignments, you will be writing agent programs to control the actions of PacMan. That is, creating a Pac-Man agent. The code enables you to use different environments to try out your Pac-Man agent programs. To specify an environment (for example, testMaze), you use the command:  

python pacman.py -–layout testMaze  

Go ahead and try it. It is a simple maze with one corridor. Here is one you will use more often:  

python pacman.py -–layout tinyMaze  

   

Figure 2: Pac-Man agent in tinyMaze.  

There are several other environments defined: mediumMaze, bigMaze, openSearch, etc. You can also vary the scale of the screen by using the –zoom option as shown below:  

python pacman.py –-layout tinyMaze –-zoom 2  python pacman.py –-layout bigMaze –-zoom 0.5  

All of these are single agent environments, the agent being Pac-Man. In these environments, PanMan always starts at the top right corner and, at the bottom left corner is a single food pellet (see picture above). The game ends when Pac-Man eats very last pellet (there can be pellets anywhere in its world).  

                 

Step 3: Learning the Pac-Man Grid and Actions  
Grid: The environment is essentially a grid of squares. At any given time, Pac-Man occupies a square and faces one of the four directions: North, South, East, or West. There may be walls in between the square (like the t-shaped wall in tinyMaze) or entire squares might be blocked by walls (like the bottom right corner of tinyMaze. regardless, the location of Pac-Man is determined by the x- and y- coordinates of the grid (as shown below):  

   

Figure 3: The Pac-Man Grid. Pac-Man is at position (5, 5). Food pellet is at (1, 1)  

Actions  
Pac-Man can only carry out the following actions:  

•       ‘North’: go one step north  

•       ‘South’: go one step south  

•       ‘East’: go one step east  

•       ‘West’: go one step west  

•       ‘Stop’: stop, do not move  

Below, you will see how these are specified to be carried out.  

                 

Step 4: Diving into Some Code  
Now that you are familiar with the basic world, it is time to get familiar with some of the code. Start by looking at the contents of the file game.py.  

Skim through the parts worth reading section of the code. Focus first on the following classes: Agent, Directions, and Configuration.  

 

Agent  
The Agent class is very simple. It is the class you will subclass to create your Pac-Man agent. For example, here is a very simple, and dumb, agent:  

from game import Agent from game import Directions 

 class DumbAgent(Agent): 

    "An agent that goes East until it can't"     def getAction(self, state): 

        "The agent always goes East"         return Directions.EAST 

  

The way it is set up, when you specify to the game (see below) that the Pac-Man will be controlled by an instance of a DumbAgent, the action returned by the getAction() method will be carried out at each time step. Important things to note in the above code are:  

•       You should create a new file called, Agents.py, in the same directory/folder as the rest of the code base. Enter the code above exactly as shown. Be sure to save the file.  

•       Every subclass of Agent (like DumbAgent) is required to implement a getAction() method. This is the method called in each time step of the game and as mentioned above, it should return a valid action for Pac-Man to carry out.  

•       Notice that we are importing the classes Agent and Directions from game.py.  

•       The getAction() method is supplied a parameter: state, which it can use to find out about the current game state (more on this below). For now, we are ignoring it.  

•       Study the class Directions (defined in game.py).  

Step 5: Run the code  
Next run the Pac-Man game with its control as DumbAgent using the command:  

python pacman.py –-layout tinyMaze –-pacman DumbAgent  

The command above is specifying to run the Pac-Man game using the tinyMaze environment and the agent is controlled by the DumbAgent. What happens?  

In the Pac-Man game, if the path to the grid is blocked and Pac-Man tries to go into it, the game crashes with an “Illegal action” exception. This is OK. After all, it is a dumb agent. We’ll fix that next. Try the same agent in the mediumMaze. Same result, right? Good!  

Step 6: Learning about GameState  
Next, lets us try and use the information present in the state parameter. This is an object of type GameState which is defined in the file pacman.py. Study the GameState class closely and note the methods defined. Using these, you can get all kinds of information about the current state of the game. Then you can base your agent’s action accordingly. Below, we show how you can use some of these and prevent the game from crashing.  

class DumbAgent(Agent): 

    "An agent that goes East until it can't."     def getAction(self, state): 

        "The agent receives a GameState (defined in pacman.py)."         print("Location: ", state.getPacmanPosition())         print("Actions available: ", state.getLegalPacmanActions())         if Directions.EAST in state.getLegalPacmanActions(): 

            print("Going East.")             return Directions.EAST         else:             print("Stopping.") 

            return Directions.STOP 

 

As in Step 4, save this version of your program in Agents.py and run it on tinyMaze, as well as mediumMaze. Observe the behavior. Try out some of the other methods defined in GameState to get an idea of what information is available to your agent.  

Step 7: A Random Agent  
OK, now it is time to write your own agent code.  

Exercise 1: Create a new class called, RandomAgent (in the Agents.py file), which based on the current options and pick a random action to carry out. Run your agent in the tinyMaze environment as well as mediumMaze environment. Observe the agent’s behavior. Does it get to the food? Always? Without crashing? Etc.  

Step 8: Exploring Environments  
See the files in the folder/directory layouts. Environments are specified using simple text files (*.lay) which are then rendered nicely by the graphics modules in the code base. Examine several layout files to see how to specify walls, ghosts, pacman, food, etc.  

Exercise 2: Create a small environment of your own. Make sure it has walls and corridors, as well as some food. Save it as myLayout.lay in the layouts directory.  

Run your RandomAgent in this environment and observe how it does.  

Also, try your agent out in the openSearch environment (files are already provided in the layouts directory). Run your agent several times and record, on average, what score you get.  

Step 9: A Better Random Agent  
If you print out and look at the choice of actions at each step, you will notice that RandomAgent always includes a choice for the ‘Stop’ action. This tends to slow it down. Stopping is needed in situations where you need to evade ghosts. For now, in environments without any ghosts, you can choose not to pick the ‘Stop’ action.   

Exercise 3: Create a new class called BetterRandomAgent (in the file Agent.py) so that it never chooses ‘Stop’ as its action. Run the agent in openSearch and myLayout environments and observe how it does.  

Step 10: Percepts  
What the Pac-Man agent can perceive is based on the methods of the GameState class which is defined in the file pacman.py. Open this file and let's look through the options.   

It is important to realize that the game has several different agents (Pac-Man and the ghosts). Each agent in the game has a unique index; Pac-Man is always index 0, with ghosts starting at index 1.   

Pac-Man can perceive:   

•       His position   

•       The position of all the ghosts   

•       The locations of the walls   

•       The positions of the capsules   

•       The positions of each food pellet   

•       The total number of food pellets still available   

•       Whether it has won or lost the game   

•       His current score in the game   

In addition, Pac-Man can also determine given the action it chooses what the next state of the environment will be, by using the method generatePacmanSuccessor(). It is clear from the methods available here that Pac-Man's environment is fully observable. Pac-Man's environment is also static because until it decides what to do and takes an action, the ghosts do not move.  

Exercise 4: In the file Agents.py create a new agent called ReflexAgent. This agent should look at the possible legal actions, and if one of these actions would cause a food pellet to be eaten, it should choose that action. If none of the immediate actions lead to food, it should choose randomly from the possibilities (excluding 'Stop'). Test your agent in both the openSearch and myLayout layouts.