Take the 2-minute tour ×

For an ai-class project I need to implement a reinforcement learning algorithm which beats a simple game of tetris. The game is written in Java and we have the source code. I know the basics of reinforcement learning theory but was wondering if anyone in the SO community had hands on experience with this type of thing.

  1. What would your recommended readings be for an implementation of reinforced learning in a tetris game?
  2. Are there any good open source projects that accomplish similar things that would be worth checking out?

Edit: The more specific the better, but general resources about the subject are welcomed.

Follow up:

Thought it would be nice if I posted a followup.

Here's the solution (code and writeup) I ended up with for any future students :).

Paper / Code

share|improve this question
+1 for asking a good homework question. It's refreshing to see someone asking to learn something than asking to be given something. –  Chris Lutz Apr 13 '09 at 22:13
Definitely agreed; asking for good learning resources is a great question, and it's also helpful for others in future –  Sukasa May 28 '09 at 22:04

5 Answers 5

up vote 9 down vote accepted

Take a look at the 2009 RL-competition. One of the problem domains is a tetris game. There was a tetris problem the year before too. Here’s the 52-page final report from that year’s fifth-place finalist, which goes into a lot of detail about how the agent worked.

share|improve this answer
sounds interesting but links appear to be dead.... –  mikera Apr 15 '13 at 3:42
@mikera Partially fixed; the 2009 RL-competition website is gone but the Internet Archive saved most of the text. –  andrewdotn Apr 15 '13 at 19:58
Dropbox links are giving 404 errors. –  Robert Oschler Mar 2 at 12:03

The Heaton Research ebook is quite good at explaining neural network concepts (with code). Chapter 4 is dedicated to machine learning and the various training methods for your networks. There is a downloadable library and sample applications for you to look at.

share|improve this answer

Here is a good book on the subject:

Machine Learning and Data Mining: Introduction to Principles and Algorithms
by Igor Kononenko, Matjaz Kukar (June, 2007)

Also take a look at these open source projects:

share|improve this answer

TD-Gammon, gnubackgammon, or any other similar project were massive successes in games.

Sutton & Barto's book "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction" also has some other Case Studies.

share|improve this answer

This is not specific to reinforced learning, but Stanford has a great series of lectures on machine learning on Youtube and iTunes.

The link is to the first lecture which takes approximately 30 minutes to dive into the content.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer


