Credit: NVIDIA

Just in time for the yellow’s mouth’s 40th anniversary.

Here’s a fun factoid for you: when Pac-Man first released to arcades on May 22, 1980, it set the record for longest development time on a video game, clocking in at 17 months to design and code. Seems kinda silly these days, right? Such a seemingly simple game took so long to code; that’s as long as some modern games take to complete, and those are far more complicated. Game development was still a pretty young science back then, though, so I guess it makes sense. As a little present to the rolling yellow wonder for his 40th anniversary, NVIDIA decided to show off one of its newest creations as a display of how far the tech has come.

NVIDIA has been tinkering with an artificial intelligence program lately called GameGAN. GameGAN is a generative adversarial network; in the simplest terms I can possibly manage, it has the ability to copy something else just by observing it. Y’know Ditto? From Pokemon? It’s like AI Ditto. In order to show off GameGAN’s capabilities, NVIDIA had it observe 50,000 play sessions of the original Pac-Man. It only received images, however; no code, no game engine, just moving pictures. Once it had the visual data, NVIDIA had GameGAN recreate Pac-Man entirely from scratch. Just by watching what the game looked like and how it played, it was able to create a stunningly accurate recreation from literally nothing. That’s one smart program.

Credit: NVIDIA/Bandai-Namco

“There have been many AIs created in recent years, that can play games, they’re agents within these games,” NVIDIA’s VP of simulation technology, Rev Lebaredian, told Engadget. “But this is the first GAN that’s been created that can actually reproduce the game itself as a black box.”

In addition to being a neat trick, this could be a promising step for AI tech as a whole. AI could, at least in theory, be trained to perform all sorts of tasks just by watching a lot of footage of the task being done. Have it watch someone’s dad flipping a burger a few thousand times, plug in a spatula, and it’ll flip burgers with the best of them. I don’t think we can train it to make dad jokes yet, though.