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80,730

I just had, what some refer to as, an out of body experience. I just scored 80,730 points in Pacman. I... I... I can’t even explain it. You know, I’ve been playing this game a lot in the last... month or so? And in playing it so much, I've started to really see how the four nemesis ghosts (BLiNKY, PiNKY, iNKEY and CLYDE) move around the board. I've begun to see how they react to what I do. How, by moving to particular areas of the board and then standing still, I can almost dictate where they move and the decisions they make. It’s very similar to a project Marco and I worked on at Syracuse concerning Artificial Intelligence. I guess you could say that I’ve been able to, over time, dissect the ghosts’ knowledge base. I think that’s an accurate term, too. Whereas they don’t actually learn and add to that knowledge base from the actual game play (for if that were the case, the more I played, the smarter they’d become and I’d perform worse and worse), they do become slightly smarter at every level you reach. Granted, that is programmed into the game, so I guess an argument could be made that it is not, in fact, knowledge engineering, but this is how I relate to it. So for the purposes of this post, I’m going with it. So anyway, I’ve learned how they navigate the board relative to me but I don’t perform on the level I did this morning during every game I play. Generally speaking, this is the case because I make mistakes. Operator error is by far the biggest reason, I suspect, that people don’t do better at Pacman on a regular basis. Well, this morning, I didn’t really make any mistakes. At least not through the first seven levels. I didn’t even die for the first time until I had over 71,000 points. Seventy-one thousand! Previous to this, my high game was 65 thousand and change. I also got screwed on my extra guys. You get an extra guy at 10,000 points and then every 20 grand after that. But the spot on the board to denote how many lives you have left is only big enough to show four Pacmans. Well, you start with two lives, and then I earned four more (one at 10k, 30k, 50k, and 70k) but it only showed me as having four lives left. I should have had six. I assumed that the game kept the real number in some unseen variable and it would all get worked out in the end. But no. As it is, you can’t have more than four extra lives. hrumph. After I died once, I started making some stupid mistakes. That, coupled with the fact that BLiNKY, PiNKY, iNKEY and CLYDE get pretty fast and smart by level 8, is why, after not dying once until 71,000 points, I managed to die three times between 71,000 and 80,730. Clearly, my goal now is one-hundred thousand points.

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pacman.html