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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

The demo GIFs show Sonic 1 and 3, but all 3 Genesis games have slightly different physics and mechanics which could trip up an AI if not trained on all 3 games. Is the challenge just using the Sonic 1 engine?

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The challenge is using all 3 Genesis games.

Yes, just found it in the details: https://contest.openai.com/details

From the downloaded CSV of game states, all stages from the 3 games are valid training stages, and the custom stages used for testing are derived from all 3 games. Yikes.

I really hope those custom stages use the same art assets as the original games.

Every test run could theoretically start with a jump or some other behavior to exercise the different physics or whatever among the 3 games, and use a discriminator network to feed into one of three networks individually trained on each game?

The whole point of the OpenAI exercise is to improve transfer learning- a winning project should be able to work off of a single model.

For an example of a system that does learn new rules using a single model check out this post from Vicarious[0].

[0] https://www.vicarious.com/2017/08/07/general-game-playing-wi...

I'd imagine part of any reinforcement learning approach would be randomly tweaking the physics for each run, to make it robust against small changes and errors. Handling the different games (assuming they're similar enough) should just be an extension of that.

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