A team of researchers have managed to develop an artificial intelligence capable of mastering the arcade classic Ms. Pac-Man. Maluuba — a Canadian deep learning startup that was acquired by Microsoft in January 2017 — used a divide-and-conquer technique to empower its system to complete the Atari 2600 version of the game with a perfect score of 999,990.
Maluuba’s approach is interesting, because it breaks down the strategies and maneuvers required to beat the game into their component parts. Various different agents focus on one job and one job alone, while an agent put in charge of managing from the top makes high-level decisions about what actions should be prioritized.
For instance, some agents might be tasked with chasing down pellets, while others focused on avoiding enemies. The decision-making agent would then choose the best option based on weighted logic — if a hundred agents wanted to move left to grab a pellet, but only three wanted to move right to avoid a ghost, it would elect to move right because colliding with the enemy would end the run.
Ms. Pac-Man is relatively widely used in AI research because of the unpredictable nature of its gameplay, according to a post on the official Microsoft blog. Steve Golson, who is credited as co-creator of the original arcade version of the game, notes that this was intentional, as the game was reliant on players spending quarter after quarter on extra lives for it to be a financial success.
Maluuba used reinforcement learning, a process by which an AI receives positive or negative feedback for each attempt it makes at a problem, to address this unpredictability. It’s hoped that reinforcement learning could help foster systems that are better equipped to make decisions on their own, compared to those that are trained via supervised learning, where the system is simply fed good and bad examples to establish a base of experience.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.