Overview

The bottom two thirds of the screen are covered by a mass of water with four rows of ice blocks floating horizontally. The player moves by jumping from one row to another while trying to avoid various kinds of foes including crabs and birds. There are also fish which grant extra points.

On the top of the screen is the shore where the player must build the Igloo. From the fourth level onwards there is also a polar bear walking around on the shore which must be avoided.

The game levels alternate between large ice blocks and little ice pieces. The levels with the little pieces are actually easier, since one can walk left or right over them without falling in the water.

Each time the player jumps on a piece of ice in a row its color changes from white to blue and the player gets an ice block in the Igloo on the shore. The player has the ability to change the direction in which the ice is flowing by pressing the fire button, but that costs a piece of the Igloo.

After the player has jumped on all the pieces on the screen, they all turn back to white and one can jump on them again. When all the 15 ice blocks required for building the Igloo are gathered, the player has to get back to the shore and get inside it, thus proceeding to the next level. On every level the enemies and the ice blocks move slightly faster than in the previous level making the game more difficult.

Each level must be completed in 45 seconds, (represented as the declining temperature,) else the eskimo dies frozen. The faster the level is completed the more bonus points are awarded to the player. If player makes it past level 20, a “magic” fish will appear between the temperature gage and the number of lives remaining, this serves no real purpose other than as an Easter egg to the game.

Description from Wikipedia

Performances of RL Agents

We list various reinforcement learning algorithms that were tested in this environment. These results are from RL Database. If this page was helpful, please consider giving a star!

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Human Starts

Result Algorithm Source
4202.8 Human Massively Parallel Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
4141.1 Rainbow Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
4038.4 PDD DQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
3510.0 Prioritized DDQN (rank, tuned) Prioritized Experience Replay
2930.2 Prioritized DDQN (prop, tuned) Prioritized Experience Replay
2813.9 Distributional DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
2332.4 DuDQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
1448.1 DDQN (tuned) Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
426.6 Gorila DQN Massively Parallel Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
288.7 Prioritized DQN (rank) Prioritized Experience Replay
258.3 DDQN Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
197.6 A3C LSTM Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
190.5 A3C FF Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
180.1 A3C FF 1 day Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
157.4 DQN Massively Parallel Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
66.4 Random Massively Parallel Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning

No-op Starts

Result Algorithm Source
9590.5 Rainbow Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
8042.1 Reactor The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
7932.2 Reactor The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
7413.0 PDD DQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
7136.7 Reactor ND The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
4839 QR-DQN-0 Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Quantile Regression
4672.8 DuDQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
4384 QR-DQN-1 Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Quantile Regression
4334.7 Human Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
4334.7 Human Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
4324 IQN Implicit Quantile Networks for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
3965 C51 A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
3938.2 Distributional DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
2923 NoisyNet DuDQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
2807 DuDQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
2744.15 IMPALA (deep, multitask) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
1683.3 DDQN A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
1000 DQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
797.4 DQN A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
753 NoisyNet DQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
605.16 Gorila DQN Massively Parallel Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
328.3 DQN Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
317.75 IMPALA (deep) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
288 A3C Noisy Networks for Exploration
269.65 IMPALA (shallow) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
261 NoisyNet A3C Noisy Networks for Exploration
241.5 DDQN Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
216.9 Linear Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
180.9 Contingency Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
65.2 Random Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning

Normal Starts

Result Algorithm Source
2875 DRQN Deep Recurrent Q-Learning for Partially Observable MDPs
519 DQN Ours Deep Recurrent Q-Learning for Partially Observable MDPs
436 DQN Ours Deep Recurrent Q-Learning for Partially Observable MDPs
414 DRQN Deep Recurrent Q-Learning for Partially Observable MDPs
314.2 PPO Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithm
285.6 ACER Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithm
261.8 A2C Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithm