Microsoft Masters *Ms. Pac-Man* With a Horde of AI Agents

Last month in Montreal, researchers huddled around a monitor at Maluuba, an artificial intelligence startup Microsoft acquired in January, to learn the answer to a minor mystery of computer science: What happens when you score a million points at classic Atari game Ms. Pac-Man? Such a question might seem to lack a certain urgency, considering the game and its original arcade version were released in 1982. But they would soon get an answer: An inhuman, machine-learning powered player they had built was chomping towards a seven-digit score. The moment proved somewhat anticlimactic. "It just reset to zero, it was kind of disappointing," says Rahul Mehrotra, a program manager at Maluuba, who was part of the small crowd.