Using an artificial intelligence-based program, Microsoft researchers have achieved the perfect score of 999,990 points in the Atari 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man.

Before this, the previous all-time high score was 266,330 points achieved by a player in Brazil, according to the arcade game-tracking website Highscore.com.

See below for footage of the AI's achievement in a video provided by Microsoft:

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The feat was accomplished by the Maluuba team, a Canadian deep learning startup that the tech giant acquired in early 2017. The team split Ms. Pac-Man into individual parts, divided them among AI agents and had them work on different pieces to achieve the goal of the perfect high score, according to Microsoft.

Maluuba called this technique the Hybrid Reward Architecture, and it used 150 different AI agents to work alongside each other to master the classic arcade game. The team then dubbed one of the agents the top agent, and made it take suggestions from all the other AI components in making the best movement decisions.

Harm Van Seijen, a Maluuba research manager, wrote in a paper detailing the feat that each agent was most effective when it acted "egotistically."

"There's this nice interplay between how they have to, on the one hand, cooperate based on the preferences of all the agents, but at the same time each agent cares only about one particular problem," he said in a Microsoft blog post. "It benefits the whole."

Business Insider pointed out some irony in the fact that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, in the past, that Google was creating AI to win video games while her company was working to get real work done.