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      $270, 2,561-piece Lego Pac-Man arcade cabinet will eat ghosts, disposable income

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Monday, 22 May, 2023 - 14:59

    • Lego's 2,561-piece Pac-Man arcade cabinet. [credit: Lego ]

    Lego's video game-themed sets for adults have focused mostly on home consoles and the Super Mario universe , but its newest set is turning its eyes to the arcade era. A new 2,561-piece Lego Icons set recreates the original Pac-Man arcade cabinet, complete with a hand crank on the side that makes Pac-Man, Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde move (along pre-determined paths) on its "screen."

    The set will launch on June 4 for $270.

    The Pac-Man set isn't a full recreation of the 1980 original—it looks more like a half-height bartop arcade cabinet rather than one that goes all the way to the floor—but the marquee, the controls, and the decals on the sides are all dead ringers for the old bright-yellow cabinet.

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      Google develops an AI that can learn both chess and Pac-Man

      John Timmer · news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Thursday, 24 December, 2020 - 13:00

    The first major conquest of artificial intelligence was chess. The game has a dizzying number of possible combinations, but it was relatively tractable because it was structured by a set of clear rules. An algorithm could always have perfect knowledge of the state of the game and know every possible move that both it and its opponent could make. The state of the game could be evaluated just by looking at the board.

    But many other games aren't that simple. If you take something like Pac-Man , then figuring out the ideal move would involve considering the shape of the maze, the location of the ghosts, the location of any additional areas to clear, the availability of power-ups, etc., and the best plan can end up in disaster if Blinky or Clyde makes an unexpected move. We've developed AIs that can tackle these games, too, but they have had to take a very different approach to the ones that conquered chess and Go.

    At least until now. Today, however, Google's DeepMind division published a paper describing the structure of an AI that can tackle both chess and Atari classics.

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