NVIDIA's AI built Pac-Man from scratch in four days

When Pac-Man hit arcades on May 22nd 1980, it held the record for time spent in development having taken a whopping 17 months to design, code and complete. Now, 40 years later to the day, NVIDIA needed just four days to train its new GameGAN AI to wholly recreate it based only on watching another AI play through. Dubbed GameGAN, it's a generative adversarial network (hence, GAN) similar to those used to generate (and detect) photo-realistic images of people that do not exist. The generator is trained on a large sample dataset and then instructed to generate an image based on what it saw. The discriminator then compares the generated image to the sample dataset to determine how close the two resemble one another.