I trained 6 AIs to land a lunar lander, and ONE dominates all

Sean Escalante
2 min readJun 19, 2023

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For my project in our deep learning course, I thought for a long time which deep learning task I should do. We have been doing image classification, natural language processing, and style transfer a lot in class, but I wanted to do something different. I like video games and I like to have fun in what I do. Then in our last session:

So I trained six AIs to do the Lunar Lander task using Deep Q-Networks (DQN) and custom wrappers to change the environment.

How well did the six AIs perform?

After training, I let each model play the game 1000 times.

Notably, model 6 had the highest number of successful landings, with a total of 833. It was followed by model 3 which only had 598 successes.

Although model 6 takes almost twice the time it takes model 3 to play one trial, model 6 had a much higher success rate. Lastly, model 6 also had the highest mean reward, which showcases that its performance is better than the others.

A more detailed discussion of the project is available in my public GitHub repository: https://github.com/Bamb0ozle/ml3-project

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Sean Escalante

Statistics Graduate | Graduate Student | LoL Esports Enthusiast