On a rainy November weekend, I decided to test drive the Devvit framework, designed for creating apps and games within the Reddit ecosystem. Within a day or two, I had built the first version of Pick-A-Partridge. It’s a festive game of memory, themed around the Twelve Days of Christmas, which will become clear from the backing music when you come to play it.

The game now has its own subreddit, r/pick_a_partridge, which is where you can play. A lot of people are!

This is a short post to describe my practical introduction to Reinforcement Learning (RL), where I trained a simple agent to play the classic Atari game Pong via a Deep Q-Network.

In English, this means we teach a novice computer to play the classic paddle game by allowing it to observe what happens when it performs various movements at different times and stages of gameplay (against the same, fairly strong opponent). Then, after making a sequence of movement choices, our agent either gets a point (reward of +1) or loses one (reward of -1). After a lot of trial and error, the agent will have observed enough situations to learn what is a good move to make at a given moment in the game.