“What can scientists learn by teaching two monkeys to play Pac-Man?” asks the South China Morning Post.
“Quite a lot it seems, according to researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.”
A team of neuroscientists from the academy said they used the classic video game to look at the way the primates made decisions. The result was the first study of its kind to show that monkeys were capable of formulating strategies to simplify a sophisticated task, they said. “To our knowledge, this is the first quantitative study that shows animals develop and use strategies for problem solving,” Yang Tianming, corresponding author of the study, said on Twitter. The results were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal eLife last month.
The scientists used artificial intelligence to come up with a statistical model to find out whether the monkey’s behaviour could be broken down into a set of strategies…. The monkeys were then trained to use a joystick to manoeuvre Pac-Man around a maze to collect snack pellets and avoid ghosts. The monkeys received fruit juice as a reward instead of earning points. Yang and his colleagues found the monkeys understood the basic elements of the game because they tended to choose the direction with the largest local reward and knew how to react to ghosts in different modes…. More importantly, the researchers found that the monkeys adopted a hierarchical solution for the Pac-Man game by using one dominant strategy and only focusing on a subset of game aspects at a time.
The researchers said the study was significant because it was quantitative and examined complex tasks…. The study said the findings paved the way for further understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying sophisticated cognitive functions.
Plus, teaching monkeys to play Pac-Man sounds like fun.
Though I wonder how they feel about Donkey Kong….
