Am I the only one that gets a bit of a chill watching an UFAI play a game where it runs from its pursuers collecting resources until it gains the power to kill them?
To be sincere, I don't know what kind of Pac Man implementation was that. In the original game, each ghost has a personality [1], the ones in the video seem to just wander aimlessly, so it doesn't really tell much about strength of the algorithm to beat the game because it's not the same game.
So, to comment on your dystopian prediction, I'm not sure this algorithm would do any better against humans, unless all we do is wander aimlessly too ;)
Probably because they implemented the game themselves and took some shortcuts. But it still seems like pretty much the same game.
I doubt it would do better than humans because it's not very efficient, but a better AI running on the same principles could be smarter than even humans and outperform us outside the virtual world.
If your scale of Pac-man competence stretches from "my grandma" to "arcade addict", then the AI looks incompetent. But if your scale stretches from "rock" to "human", it looks worryingly competent.
