Overview

The player controls a spaceship that moves horizontally at the bottom of the screen, firing upward. Enemies, typically one of two types of birds, appear on the screen above the player’s ship, shooting at it and periodically diving towards it in an attempt to crash into it. The ship is equipped with a shield that can be used to zap any of the alien creatures that attempt to crash into the spaceship. The player cannot move while the shield is active and must wait approximately five seconds before using it again.

The player starts with three or six lives, depending on the settings.

Each level has five separate rounds. The player must complete a round to advance to the next.

Rounds 1 and 2 – The player must destroy a formation of alien birds. While in formation, some of the birds fly down kamikaze style, in an attempt to destroy the player’s spaceship by crashing into it. Hitting a bird flying diagonally awards a bonus score. The birds are yellow in round 1, pink in round 2. The player’s spaceship is given rapid fire for round 2, where the birds fly somewhat more unpredictably. Rounds 3 and 4 – Flying eggs float on the screen and seconds later hatch, revealing larger alien birds, resembling phoenices, which swoop down at the player’s spaceship. The only way to fully destroy one of these birds is by hitting it in its belly; shooting one of its wings merely destroys that wing, and if both wings are destroyed, they will regenerate. From time to time the birds may also revert to the egg form for a brief period. The birds are blue in round 3, pink in round 4. Round 5 – The player is pitted against the mothership, which is controlled by an alien creature sitting in its center. To complete this round, the player must create a hole in the conveyor belt-type shield to get a clear shot at the alien. Hitting the alien with a single shot ends the level. The mothership fires missiles at the player’s ship, moves slowly down towards it, and has alien birds (from rounds 1 and 2) protecting it. Defeating all of the birds will produce a new wave. The game continues with increasing speed and unpredictability of the bird and phoenix flights.

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
103061.6 Rainbow Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
74786.7 A3C LSTM Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
63597.0 PDD DQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
52894.1 A3C FF Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
31358.3 Distributional DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
28181.8 A3C FF 1 day Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
27430.1 Prioritized DDQN (prop, tuned) Prioritized Experience Replay
20410.5 DuDQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
16903.6 Prioritized DDQN (rank, tuned) Prioritized Experience Replay
16107.8 Prioritized DQN (rank) Prioritized Experience Replay
12366.5 DDQN (tuned) Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
10364.0 DDQN Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
7484.8 DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
6686.2 Human Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
6686.2 Human Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
1134.4 Random Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning

No-op Starts

Result Algorithm Source
210996.45 IMPALA (deep) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
133433.7 ACKTR Scalable trust-region method for deep reinforcement learning using Kronecker-factored approximation
108528.6 Rainbow Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
70324.3 PDD DQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
65767 QR-DQN-0 Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Quantile Regression
56599 IQN Implicit Quantile Networks for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
50338 NoisyNet A3C Noisy Networks for Exploration
46536.4 Reactor The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
40092.2 Reactor The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
34775.0 Distributional DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
33068.15 IMPALA (shallow) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
23092.2 DuDQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
17490 C51 A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
16585 QR-DQN-1 Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Quantile Regression
16028 NoisyNet DQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
12252.5 DDQN A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
10379 NoisyNet DuDQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
10261.4 Reactor ND The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
9704 DQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
9476 A3C Noisy Networks for Exploration
8485.2 DQN A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
8485.2 DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
8215 DuDQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
7486.5 IMPALA (deep, multitask) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
7242.6 Human Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
761.4 Random Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Normal Starts

| Result | Algorithm | Source | |——–|———–|——–|