Neural Slime Volleyball

Games

neural network game

SHOW HN2015

147points
74comments
#141of 2,565 in 2015
Top 6%of 2015 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

13 positive, 26 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 6 critical, out of 46 comments about the project. Thread score +0.06.

Idea: 8 for, 2 againstDesign: 0 for, 3 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 againstPerformance: 0 for, 1 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Interesting neuroevolution approach

    From 2 comments
    • [accompanying blog post](http://blog.otoro.net/2015/03/28/neural-slime-volleyball/) I too am perplexed as to what the neurons represent, the blog describes the RNN as 19 inputs…
      deepnet on HN
    • While Deep-Q-Learning is powerful, it uses backprop - your use of CNE genetic evolution rather than backprop may provide a more global search than Mnih's Deep-Q. The methods seem…
      deepnet on HN
  • Fun old-school game

    From 2 comments
    • Yeah, judging the angles and getting the ball to bounce in the right direction is really hard. But I'm gonna see if my kids can play this. I'm guessing they probably can. I like…
      uuave on HN
    • [accompanying blog post](http://blog.otoro.net/2015/03/28/neural-slime-volleyball/) I too am perplexed as to what the neurons represent, the blog describes the RNN as 19 inputs…
      deepnet on HN

Objections

  • Game is very hard to play as a human

    From 2 comments
    • This is cute but I think it's just a really hard game to play as a human. Your little dude can't move fast enough.
      ebbv on HN
    • This is massively frustrating :) although I started to develop some strategies once I got used to the controls. I have a question though: In useful.js, there's a function like…
      chillingeffect on HN
  • Arrow key bindings fail on non-QWERTY keyboards

    From 1 comment
    • Please modify the bindings, the directional keys are international, without a qwerty keyboard I can't play - and no, I will not modify it systemwide for just a JS game. Nice one…
      data_scientist on HN

Requests

  • Version that starts untrained so training can be watched

    From 2 comments
    • Hope it didn't seem like I was trying to criticize. The app is really cool, and thanks for open-sourcing it. I'd be really interested in seeing the version that doesn't start…
      squeaky-clean on HN
    • As requested, I put up a demo of neural slime volleyball without any pre-trained agents so you can see them improve gradually as they evolve:…
      hardmaru on HN
  • Write-up explaining how it works

    From 1 comment
    • Whoa.... any chance you can write up something on how this works? I've never seen a working implementation of a recurrent net before. I would be very grateful!! Either way, this…
      cowpig on HN

Questions

  • How the network was trained

    From 1 comment
  • Whether it keeps learning from the human player

    From 1 comment
    • Does it continue to learn when I take over control, eg: learn from me, or is the learning done at the time I can play?
      donatj on HN

Alternatives named

  • Original Java Slime Volleyball game

    From 1 comment
    • Very interesting-- slime volleyball was quite the thing back in my high school days. (See it here if you can get the Java applets to run in 2015 [1]) I was surprised to see a few…
      bufordsharkley on HN
  • Schmidhuber's Evolino

    From 1 comment
    • The method is not unique. See some of the work of Schmidhuber's group. They are doing a lot of reinforcement learning for recurrent nets (LSTMs) and also via evolutionary…
      albertzeyer on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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