AI Gets Perfect Score On Ms. Pacman, Achieves The Impossible

Ms. Pacman is the 1980s gaming sensation that kids and adults went absolutely crazy about. Many prided themselves on getting high scores in their respective arcades, but none have ever gotten the coveted perfect score. Then Microsoft acquisition Maluuba unleashed its artificial intelligence on the game and got 999,999, a feat that no human or machine has ever achieved.

AIs beating humans at their own games is not a new concept by any reach of the imagination, Forbes reports. Machines have been trouncing the best players in Go, Chess, Checkers, and Poker over the last few years. Yet, this new development involving Maluuba’s AI is significant for several reasons, one of which is the choice of game.

The creators of Ms. Pacman never intended the game to be beaten or for players to get a perfect score. At the time of its release, it was meant to keep players spending quarters in order to conquer the more complicated successor of Mr. Pacman.

Aside from choosing Ms. Pacman, there is also the matter of how the researchers created multiple, simple intelligence that was intended to learn specific aspects of the game. As a result, the game was broken down into several features that the researchers then plugged into the final AI.

This is the company’s signature method of approaching machine learning, which makes it stand out from the increasingly crowded industry. Basically, looking at the problem from individual angles and positions allows the researchers to gather data about a particular subject from multiple points of view. This removes the limitation that a single AI often has, no matter how advanced it might be.

This is what allowed the AI to achieve a kind of score that’s four times the highest record by humans, Time reports. The method has implications beyond video games as well since it can be applied to the financial sector to create the ultimate expert.