Low Han Bin, final year Computer Science student and winner of the Ms Pac-Man Competition
Han Bin Low (James), a final year undergraduate at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus, won the first Ms. Pac-Man vs. Ghost-Team Competition that was held recently at the 2011 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2011), New Orleans, USA.
The IEEE CEC is one of the largest and leading international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners in Evolutionary Computation and Computational Intelligence all over the world. The IEEE CEC is sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, which represents an international community of contributors in all computational and theoretical aspects of mimicking nature for problem-solving.
The IEEE CEC runs several competitions with the aim to utilise state-of-the-art, nature-inspired algorithms and bridge the gap between theory and application in problem-solving tasks. The games competitions provide an ideal, challenging, and fun test-bed for research into Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence techniques. Results from these competitions are frequently published in the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.
The Ms. Pac-Man Competition uses a well-known variant of the classic arcade game, Pac-Man, that was developed in 1980 by Toru Iwatani. Previous competitions have considered submissions for Ms. Pac-Man controllers to compete for highest points against a team of programmed ghosts that hunt down Ms. Pac-Man. The goal of the competition is to design software controllers to collect points by navigating around a maze eating dots while avoiding contact with ghosts.
For 2011, the competition opens for the first time controllers for both Ms. Pac-Man and Ghost-Team that use Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence techniques. The competition pits researchers from nine countries all over the world. The Ms. Pac-Man controller that Han Bin submitted and won the competition was developed as part of his final year project for the BSc (Hons) Computer Science & Management Studies. Han Bin was supervised by Dr. Siang Yew Chong, an assistant professor with the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus.
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For further information on this story you may contact:
Han Bin Low hblow22@hotmail.com
Dr. Siang Yew Chong: siang-yew.chong@nottingham.edu.my
Notes to editors: The University of Nottingham, described by The Times as “the embodiment of the modern international university", has award-winning campuses in the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. It is ranked in the UK's Top 10 and the World's Top 75 universities by the Shanghai Jiao Tong (SJTU) and the QS World University Rankings.
The University is committed to providing a truly international education for its 39,000 students, producing world-leading research and benefiting the communities around its campuses in the UK and Asia.
More than 90 per cent of research at The University of Nottingham is of international quality, according to the most recent Research Assessment Exercise, with almost 60 per cent of all research defined as ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’. Research Fortnight analysis of RAE 2008 ranked the University 7th in the UK by research power.
The University’s vision is to be recognised around the world for its signature contributions, especially in global food security, energy & sustainability, and health.
More news from the University at: http://www.nottingham.edu.my/NewsEvents/News.aspx
Posted on 14th June 2011