The Atari video game Q*bert came out in 1982, and over the years its fans thought they had learned all its little tricks and quirks. Then in 2018, an AI playing the game started doing something very strange: it found that leaping rapidly from platform to platform caused the platforms to blink rapidly and let the AI suddenly accumulate ridiculous numbers of points. Human players had never discovered this trick—and we still can’t figure out how it works.
