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Show HN: Beating Pokemon Red with RL and <10M Parameters

drubinstein.github.io

11–20 of 71 posts

Re: Show HN: Beating Pokemon Red with RL and <10M Parameters

#11
post #8

Can't Pokemon be beaten by almost random play?

It can be brute forced if that’s what you mean. It has a fairly low difficulty curve and these old games have a grid system for movement and action selections. That’s why they’re pointing out the lower parameter amount and CPU. The point I took away is doing more with less.

Re: Show HN: Beating Pokemon Red with RL and <10M Parameters

#13

What an awesome project! I'm curious - I would have thought that rewarding unique coordinates would be enough to get the agent to (eventually) explore all areas, including the key ones. What did the agents end up doing before key areas got an extra reward? (and how on earth did you port Pokémon red to a RL environment? O.o)

The environments wouldn't concentrate enough in the Rocket Hideout beneath Celadon Game Corner. The agent would have the player wander the world reward hacking. With wild battles enabled, the environments would end up in Lavender Tower fighting Gastly.

> (and how on earth did you port Pokémon red to a RL environment? O.o)

Read and find out :)

Re: Show HN: Beating Pokemon Red with RL and <10M Parameters

#14
post #8

Can't Pokemon be beaten by almost random play?

It can be brute forced if that’s what you mean. It has a fairly low difficulty curve and these old games have a grid system for movement and action selections. That’s why they’re pointing out the lower parameter amount and CPU. The point I took away is doing more with less.

It definitely cannot be beaten using random inputs. It doesn't even get out of Pallet Town after billions of steps. We tested...

Re: Show HN: Beating Pokemon Red with RL and <10M Parameters

#16

Ah, very neat. Maybe some day the “rival” character in Pokemon can be played by a RL system, haha. That way you can have a “real player (simulated)” for your rival.

a cool idea, except that battling actually doesn't even matter to the ai. if you look at what the agent is doing during a battle, it is sort of spamming options + picking damaging attacks. it would be a stretch to say that agents were 'good' at battling...

Re: Show HN: Beating Pokemon Red with RL and <10M Parameters

#17
Note: What makes this interesting is that this is a pre-LLM project which shows that in some projects you don't need an "LLM" for this. All you need is just a plain old reinforcement learning algorithm and a deep neural network which is perfect for this.

This is what I want to see more of and goes against the hype of LLMs. What a great RL project.

Meanwhile, "Claude" is still stuck somewhere in the game. Imagine the costs of running that vs this project.

Re: Show HN: Beating Pokemon Red with RL and <10M Parameters

#18
post #17

Note: What makes this interesting is that this is a pre-LLM project which shows that in some projects you don't need an "LLM" for this. All you need is just a plain old reinforcement learning algorithm and a deep neural network which is perfect for this. This is what I want to see more of and goes against the hype of LLMs. What a great RL project. Meanwhile, "Claude" is still stuck somewhere in the game. Imagine the…

Claude 3.7 recently failed to finish Pokemon after getting stuck in a corner and deciding it was impossible to get out

Re: Show HN: Beating Pokemon Red with RL and <10M Parameters

#20
Really cool work. It seems like some critical areas (team rocket, safari zone) rely on encoding game knowledge into the reward function somehow, which "smuggles in" external intelligence about the game. A lot of these are related to planning, which makes me wonder whether you could "bolt on" an LLM to do things like steer the RL agent, dynamically choose what to reward, or even do some of the planning itself. Do you think there's any low-hanging fruit on this front?
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