If you’ve ever watched King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters, you know what a big deal it is to beat a video arcade game that was designed not to lose. Most humans can’t even come close. Enter Harm van Seijen, and a team of machine learning researchers from Microsoft Maluuba in Montreal. They took on Ms. Pac-man. And won. Today we’ll talk to Harm about his work in reinforcement learning, the inspiration for hybrid reward architecture, visit a few islands of tractability and get an inside look at the science behind the AI defeat of one of the most difficult video arcade games around.