Micosoft's AI earns perfect Ms Pac-Man score

Some tasks are just too complex, too nuanced to tackle all at once, like beating all 256 levels of Ms. Pac-Man on the Atari 2600 while earning a perfect score of 999,990. That's why Microsoft didn't even try to train its AI to take it on in one go. Instead the company, as it announced on Wednesday, split this monumental challenge up into smaller, chomp-sized pieces and trained a hivemind of 150 AIs to accomplish it as a team. Developed by Maluuba, a Canadian AI firm that Microsoft recently acquired, the AI system relies on reinforcement learning to develop its strategy. Reinforcement learning is an AI training technique wherein the algorithm is rewarded for using more efficient outcomes and dissuaded from using the less effective based on previously observed outcomes.