# Approximate Dynamic Programming Finally Performs Well in the Game of Tetris

1 SEQUEL - Sequential Learning
LIFL - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille, Inria Lille - Nord Europe, LAGIS - Laboratoire d'Automatique, Génie Informatique et Signal
2 MAIA - Autonomous intelligent machine
Inria Nancy - Grand Est, LORIA - AIS - Department of Complex Systems, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics
Abstract : Tetris is a video game that has been widely used as a benchmark for various optimization techniques including approximate dynamic programming (ADP) algorithms. A look at the literature of this game shows that while ADP algorithms that have been (almost) entirely based on approximating the value function (value function based) have performed poorly in Tetris, the methods that search directly in the space of policies by learning the policy parameters using an optimization black box, such as the cross entropy (CE) method, have achieved the best reported results. This makes us conjecture that Tetris is a game in which good policies are easier to represent, and thus, learn than their corresponding value functions. So, in order to obtain a good performance with ADP, we should use ADP algorithms that search in a policy space, instead of the more traditional ones that search in a value function space. In this paper, we put our conjecture to test by applying such an ADP algorithm, called classification-based modified policy iteration (CBMPI), to the game of Tetris. Our experimental results show that for the first time an ADP algorithm, namely CBMPI, obtains the best results reported in the literature for Tetris in both small $10\times 10$ and large $10\times 20$ boards. Although the CBMPI's results are similar to those of the CE method in the large board, CBMPI uses considerably fewer (almost 1/6) samples (calls to the generative model) than CE.
Document type :
Conference papers
Domain :

Cited literature [21 references]

https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00921250
Contributor : Bruno Scherrer Connect in order to contact the contributor
Submitted on : Friday, December 20, 2013 - 10:11:11 AM
Last modification on : Saturday, December 18, 2021 - 3:01:47 AM
Long-term archiving on: : Friday, March 21, 2014 - 10:00:42 AM

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• HAL Id : hal-00921250, version 1

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Victor Gabillon, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Bruno Scherrer. Approximate Dynamic Programming Finally Performs Well in the Game of Tetris. Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2013, Dec 2013, South Lake Tahoe, United States. ⟨hal-00921250⟩

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