I had a thought today (while watching "The King of Kong" as it
happens) which is this...

we can emulate classic video games at what - 1000 times faster than
real time? 10,000 times?

So wouldn't it be possible to set up a real-time emulation that worked
out the best play
for any game by forking at each decision point and playing ahead -
either a fixed window like
10 seconds, or maybe to the end of the screen - so that it could work
out a perfect game
in real time... much the same as classic AI techniques are used to
lookahead in other
games like checkers, backgammon, scrabble, whatever...

I'm wondering just how much speed is needed to pull this off, and what
pruning algorithms.

Can you for example play a perfect game just by knowing that you can't
die in the next
10 seconds, for example, or do some games require more long-term
strategy & planning?

I'm thinking of the classic games like mspac, donkey kong, qbert etc?

I know that various people have worked on AI players for games like
pacman, but I believe
they're just heuristics, I don't think anyone has thrown power &
classic AI techniques
at it yet?

Would be a truly cool student project by the way, if we have any
students reading...

G