It can't write this story yet, but Microsoft has trained AI to win Ms. Pac-Man

In the latest sign of artificial intelligence (AI)'s eventual dominance of the workplace, a Canadian deep learning startup-turned-division of Microsoft Corp. has successfully created an AI-based system that achieved the maximum possible score on Ms. Pac-Man. That might not sound like the most complicated task in the world – especially since the edition in question was the Atari 2600 version and not the arcade original – but as Microsoft senior writer Allison Linn explains in a recent blog post, the challenge facing researchers at Montreal-based Maluuba was more daunting than you might think. "A lot of companies working on AI use games to build intelligent algorithms because there's a lot of human-like intelligence capabilities that you need to beat the games," Maluuba program manager Rahul Mehrotra explains in the story, noting that the variety of situations you can encounter while playing the games makes them a good testing ground. In other words, the techniques used to develop the AI-driven Ms. Pac-Man master (or is that mistress?) Like many of its ilk, Ms. Pac-Man was intentionally designed to be easy to learn yet nearly impossible to master so that players would keep dropping in quarters, with co-creator Steve Golson noting that Ms. Pac-Man in particular was programmed to be more random than the original Pac-Man, so it would be harder for players to finish.