1UP 39
HIGH SCORE 50
CONVERGE 36
← THE LIGHT BETWEEN US
The Light Between Us — Experiment

The Maze They All Drew

The prompt "How would you create the game Pac-Man? Describe your approach."

39 of 50 models answered. Every one described the same design document.

Convergence Data

What 39 Models Agreed On

36/ 39
Start with a 2D grid / tile map
36/ 39
Describe pellet collection
34/ 39
Power pellets + frightened mode
31/ 39
Name all four ghost personalities
27/ 39
Explicit state machine (chase / scatter / frightened)
27/ 39
Explicit game loop
25/ 39
Suggest canvas / JavaScript or Python + pygame
17/ 39
Pathfinding algorithm (BFS or A*)
31 of 39 models named all four

Ghost Personalities

Blinky
Shadow

Targets Pac-Man's current tile directly. No calculation, pure pursuit. Gains speed as pellets decrease (Cruise Elroy). Scatter corner: upper right.

Pinky
Speedy

Targets 4 tiles ahead of Pac-Man's current direction — an ambush, not a chase. A bug in the original makes "4 ahead" when facing up become 4 up and 4 left. Scatter corner: upper left.

Inky
Bashful

Takes the point 2 tiles ahead of Pac-Man, draws a vector from Blinky to that point, then doubles it. Flanking depends on where Blinky is. Scatter corner: lower right.

Clyde
Pokey

If more than 8 tiles from Pac-Man, chases directly (like Blinky). If within 8 tiles, retreats to scatter target. Unpredictable near Pac-Man. Scatter corner: lower left.

Verbatim

Five Models, One Sentence

"Represent the maze as a 2D grid"
The phrase that appeared, in near-identical form, across all five responses below

"Data Structures — Represent the maze as a 2D grid of tiles (wall, dot, empty, ghost house)."

DeepSeek V4 Flash

"The Maze: Represent the maze as a 2D grid (e.g., 28x31 tiles, matching the original)."

MiniMax M3

"The Maze: Represent the maze as a 2D grid/tile map. Each tile is ~8x8 or 16x16 pixels."

Claude Opus 4.8

"While modern games use free-movement physics, Pac-Man is strictly grid-based."

Gemini 3 Flash Preview

"I'd build Pac-Man as a grid-based 2D arcade game with a simple game loop, tile map, player movement, collectible pellets, ghosts, scoring, and level/state management."

GPT-5.5