A Ms. Pac-Man game was beaten by a Microsoft artificial intelligence robot that received a perfect score of 999,990 points on the classic Atari version of the game.
The feat is believed to be the first time the game has ever been beaten, Business Insider reported, adding that the highest score recorded was by a player in Brazil, who scored 266,330 on the game.
Gizmodo, however, credited the highest score to Abdner Ashman, who reportedly earned 933,580 points in the arcade version of the game.
In January, Microsoft acquired the AI startup Maluuba, where researchers wondered what would happen if they scored a million points on Ms. Pac-Man, Wired noted.
“It just reset to zero, it was kind of disappointing,” Rahul Mehrotra, a program manager at Maluuba, said, according to the magazine.
While the achievement may have seemed like play, Maluuba said the AI software can be applied to business functions, such as helping employees prioritize sales leads.
Gizmodo noted that Ms. Pac-Man is more unpredictable than the original Pac-Man game, and the technology created to conquer the game could help users navigate unpredictable real-world situations.
Doina Precup, an associate professor of computer science at McGill University in Montreal, said the game is among the most difficult for AI researchers to beat, according to a Microsoft blog.
A YouTube video posted by Microsoft Research described how the researchers beat the game.
"We performed well on the game by breaking it into many small problems with a separate reinforcement learning agent for each problem," the video narrator said.
More than 150 agents worked on separate problems within the game, such a pellets, fruit, and ghosts.
“This idea of having them work on different pieces to achieve a common goal is very interesting,” Precup said, according to the Microsoft blog.
"It's another step toward more general intelligence," she added.
Twitter users seemed intrigued by the achievement.
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