Overview

The player controls an insect-like creature called a Yar who must nibble or shoot through a barrier in order to fire his Zorlon Cannon into the breach. The objective is to destroy the evil Qotile, which exists on the other side of the barrier. The Qotile can attack the Yar, even if the barrier is undamaged, by turning into the Swirl and shooting across the screen. In early levels the player is warned before the Swirl is fired, and he can retreat to a safe distance to dodge the attack. The Yar can hide from a pursuing destroyer missile within a “neutral zone” in the middle of the screen, but the Yar cannot shoot while in the zone. The Swirl can kill the Yar anywhere, even inside the Neutral Zone.

To destroy the Qotile or the Swirl, the player has to either touch the Qotile or eat a piece of the shield to activate the Zorlon Cannon, aim the cannon by leading the with the Qotile or Swirl, then fire the cannon and fly the Yar out of the path of the cannon’s shot. If the weapon finds its mark, the level ends. If the cannon blast hits a piece of the shield or misses, it is expended. The cannon itself is dangerous to the player, for once it is activated, the fire button launches it instead of firing the Yar’s usual shots, and as the cannon tracks the Yar’s vertical position, players effectively use the Yar itself as a target and therefore must immediately maneuver to avoid being hit by their own shot. The cannon shot can also rebound off the shield in later levels.

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
93007.9 Rainbow Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
58145.9 PDD DQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
47135.2 Human Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
47135.2 Human Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
25976.5 DuDQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
8267.7 Distributional DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
7270.8 A3C FF 1 day Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
7157.5 A3C FF Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
6626.7 Prioritized DQN (rank) Prioritized Experience Replay
6270.6 DDQN (tuned) Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
5965.1 Prioritized DDQN (prop, tuned) Prioritized Experience Replay
5615.5 A3C LSTM Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning
5439.5 DDQN Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning
4687.4 Prioritized DDQN (rank, tuned) Prioritized Experience Replay
4577.5 DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
1476.9 Random Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning

No-op Starts

Result Algorithm Source
148855.0 Reactor The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
125169.0 ACKTR Scalable trust-region method for deep reinforcement learning using Kronecker-factored approximation
109607.5 Reactor ND The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
102760 Reactor The Reactor: A fast and sample-efficient Actor-Critic agent for Reinforcement Learning
102557.0 Rainbow Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
86101 NoisyNet DuDQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
84231.14 IMPALA (deep) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
80530.13 IMPALA (shallow) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
69618.1 PDD DQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
61755 NoisyNet A3C Noisy Networks for Exploration
54576.9 Human Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
49622.1 DDQN A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
49622.1 DuDQN Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning
43120 DuDQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
35050 C51 A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
32605 QR-DQN-0 Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Quantile Regression
28379 IQN Implicit Quantile Networks for Distributional Reinforcement Learning
26447 QR-DQN-1 Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Quantile Regression
23915 NoisyNet DQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
21596 A3C Noisy Networks for Exploration
20648 DQN Noisy Networks for Exploration
18098.9 DQN A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning
18089.9 DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
16608.6 Distributional DQN Rainbow: Combining Improvements in Deep Reinforcement Learning
14739.41 IMPALA (deep, multitask) IMPALA: Scalable Distributed Deep-RL with Importance Weighted Actor-Learner Architectures
3092.9 Random Dueling Network Architectures for Deep Reinforcement Learning

Normal Starts

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