Submission #10252: eien86, WarHippy & Twisted_Eye's NES Pac-Man Championship Edition "maximum score, Normal" in 05:10.472

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

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.

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...

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!

nymx: Claiming for judging.

nymx: Updating with trimmed input file.

nymx: MASSIVE BLOW OUT! This is an incredible feat! I never knew that you upgraded once again to more cores. 192????? DUDE!!

So this run was very surprising and it demonstrates that the idea of "Chasing" doesn't work. If you don't know what I mean by that, it's my way of saying that the immediate focus will not help out in the long run. I've observed that Jaffar keeps the points rolling faster, by maintaining a route over ghost opportunities. Eventually, the route leads to a massive increase of points over a small chunk of frames. So it is not so obvious at that moment, but it really shines later on as you see things come together in an unpredictable way. Honestly, if humans tried to mimic this...they would get lost and loose. So this is the kind of strategy that only a BOT can deliver to us...one that delivers high entertainment and surprise, and most importantly...the highest achievable score to date!

To the all time King of BOTing!!

Happily accepting to "Standard".

inconsistent: Processing...

nymx: Replacing with a movie with a higher score!!!

nymx: My original statement still stands, but I will say that anyone who does BOTing will understand that this is a complicated process. I absolutely admire the BOTINg concept. Congratulations to the three of you...what an incredible score!

Accepting once again to "Standard".

McBobX: Processing...