Pac-Man Championship Edition

THIS... is the most extremely re-recorded movie in history. Keep scrolling to see some of the most mind-blowing numbers ever in TAS

Introduction

Last year I hosted a Pac-Man competition, challenging participants to produce a 5-minute TAS to achieve the highest score possible in Normal Mode. The outcome was amazing, with the top two contenders (WarHippy and TwistedEye) fighting head-to-head to the bitter end. On the other hand, my bot-based own movie, produced with JaffarPlus had failed to beat any of the submissions! I was flabbergasted!

After extensive work and analysis, I finally found out what the problem was. Turns out I had programmed JaffarPlus to "greedily" pursue score at all costs. This meant that the bot would prioritize short-sighted bonuses (e.g., capturing ghosts), relegating the less rewarding activities (e.g., eating pellets) behind. However, eating the most pellets early turns out to be the correct long-term strategy, as it accelerates the game, enables more rewarding fruits, and spawns more ghost-eating pellets. I believe TwistedEye understood this well, as his movie focuses on pellets early on, falling way behind WarHippy's movie for a while -- that is, until the end where his early strategy paid off just in time. See the figure below to see how these scores compared as frames advanced.

https://i.ibb.co/G4v48KfP/chart.png

So I configured JaffarPlus to pursue score, yes, but also assign extra value to pellets and fruits eaten. In this way, I forced it to pursue a hybrid between WarHippy and TwistedEye's strategies. This, combined with the largest job run I even launched, resulted in a movie that crossed the 750k score mark. How big of a job, you ask? well...

The BIG Job

• Running Time: 29 days, 23 hours, 37 minutes, 56 seconds.
• Re-record Count: 9,007,912,619,000 (9 quadrillion)
• Performance: ~3.5 Mrerecords/s
• State Database: 141.95 Mstates (1.2Tb)
• Energy Used: ~500 kWh (1.8 gigajoules, 200 USD)

Software + Hardware + Manware

Rom Information

• Name: Pac-Man Championship Edition
• ROM: Pac-Man - Championship Edition (USA, Europe) (Namco Museum Archives Vol 1).nes
• SHA1: 4CBAD49930253086FBAF4D082288DF74C76D1ABC
• MD5: EE8BC8BAED5B9C5299E84E80E6490DE6

Routing Bot

• Bot: JaffarPlus
• Routing Core: QuickerNES
• Platform:
• AMD Epyc 9965 (192 cores, 384 threads) + 1536Gb RAM

Improvements

WarHippy found a few oversights in the botted route and re-worked much of it using heuristics and strategies discovered by Twisted_Eye pushing this movie up to 772,900 points!