Aallegra.345
net.games.pacman
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!allegra!phr
Tue Apr  6 02:49:04 1982
Beating the quarter eaters
I recommend Ken Uston's book "Mastering PacMan" to anyone wanting
to increase their scores and impress their friends.  It's also good
for would-be imitators who want to gain a hacker's understanding of
how the game works.  Two facts for PacMan programmers:
	1) the game is deterministic; in any given situation, the
	monsters behave in predictable ways.
	2) the monsters have personalities distinct from each other:
	for instance, "Speedy" can run faster than the PacMan on
	the straightaways (but not around corners), while "Bashful"
	will sometimes back off if attacked by the PacMan.
These imply the secret of high PacMan scores:
	The trick is to run around the board in a predetermined pattern
	which takes the monsters' behavior into account.  You can rack
	up nearly-infinite scores as long as you don't make a mistake,
	without having to make any decisions about whether monsters are
	too close for certain maneuvers, etc.

Uston's book gives a series of patterns that will turn anyone into
a PacMaster, or so he says.  I haven't tried them, but the book
made the bestseller list for a while...

PS. Biographical note from the cover: Uston is one of the most
notorious card-counting blackjack players.  Clearly some of the
hacker mentality went into this book.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
 gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
 of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/


This Usenet Oldnews Archive
article may be copied and distributed freely, provided:

1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles.

2. The following notice remains appended to each copy:

The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 
 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.