[HN Gopher] My Tamagotchi is an RL agent playing Slither.io
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My Tamagotchi is an RL agent playing Slither.io
Author : nkaz123
Score : 32 points
Date : 2026-01-06 06:22 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nkasmanoff.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (nkasmanoff.github.io)
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Corporate firewall is blocking this since its a "newly registered
| domain" but I wanted to note that Tamagotchi got me to revisit
| Digimon after I learned that Digimon was created as a way for
| Bandai to sell to boys. Color me surprised when I learned that
| Tamagotchi was considered for girls, but I played with mine like
| there was no tomorrow, with the Pokemon hype of the late 90s it
| came to many of us at the right time.
|
| Surprisingly, and I just looked it up, you can buy the original
| classic ones for about $20 straight off Amazon.
| nkaz123 wrote:
| I recently updated my .github.io to route to a domain name I
| purchased so that could be why it's getting blocked right now.
|
| This comment alone has more tamagotchi lore than my post as a
| disclaimer in case I saved you a read haha.
| remix2000 wrote:
| Clicked for Tamagotchi, but I saw none. My day is ruined. :'c
| nkaz123 wrote:
| I'm sorry for the clickbait
| gnyman wrote:
| It caught my eye also but the article was interesting so I'll
| forgive OP :-)
|
| On the topic of tamagotchi, if you happen to have a flipper
| zero there is emulator for it :-) my kid enjoyed it for while
| and it saved me a few bucks from having to buy one.
|
| https://github.com/GMMan/flipperzero-tamagotch-p1
|
| You can run it on tama-p1 on other platforms also but the
| flipper was very reminiscent of the original one.
| jeremysalwen wrote:
| As someone who implemented some RL algorithms and applied them to
| a real world game, (including all the ones mentioned in the
| article), I would be surprised if the implementation is not
| buggy. That is one of the most striking things about RL, the
| extent to which it is hard to find bugs, since they generally
| only degrade the performance instead of causing a crash or
| obviously wrong behavior. The fact that he doesn't mention a
| massive amount of time spent debugging, and the longish list of
| things that were tried that really _should_ have worked but didn
| 't, suggests to me it's probably still buggy. I suppose it is
| possible that LLMs could be particularly good at RL code since
| it's seen it repeated so many times... But I would be skeptical
| without hard evidence.
| nkaz123 wrote:
| I accepted the bugginess in the browser game as unavoidable,
| and probably had too much faith in the LLM implementations, but
| I did a bit more troubleshooting than mentioned. The
| progressive improvement over episodes (and intuitively that PPO
| > the others) gave me some confidence, and I've since used a
| similar setup on 2048 with more results showing improvement
| over episode: https://wandb.ai/noahpunintended/2048-raspberry-
| pi?nw=nwuser...
| treyd wrote:
| I had this idea during the pandemic 5 years ago now, and even did
| some of that work to figure out the variables I'd need to extract
| to make it work, but I never found the time/motivation to work on
| it for real. Really happy to see someone put in the effort.
| breakds wrote:
| The sample efficiency of the RL algorithm, even for simple games,
| is not very good. This usually means that we will need a lot of
| episodes for the policy to learn to excel. Being able to run
| policy in an environment that can parallel and accelerate could
| be very helpful for the improvement - for example running a batch
| of browsers or tabs simultaneously :)
| ohazi wrote:
| > (Sent through Gemini to blur my monitor).
|
| Excuse me, _what_?
| Stefan-H wrote:
| The image is watermarked from gemini, so presumably the author
| was trying to allay concerns that the important content was
| fake.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That doesn't answer the question of why you would use an LLM
| to blue your monitor when there are a thousand ways to do it
| yourself
| usefulposter wrote:
| The same reason today's inexperienced programmers depend
| totally on NextTailVibeJSFlare. _It 's all they know._
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| Why not? You send the picture and ask to blur the monitor
| in plain text. It gives you back the picture with a blurred
| monitor.
|
| That seems like a very easy way to do the job. What's the
| issue specifically?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Because bluing yourself is messy.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GYtgFdXCGE
| nkaz123 wrote:
| Yeah essentially this. The irony of about wanting to obscure
| information by submitting it to a model API isn't lost on me,
| but it was the easiest way I could think of. Wanted some way
| of making the most key content in my picture to be the only
| thing unblurred
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