Signal City Archive Desk · Atari, 1972 · avoid missing ball for high score · back to the desk
Play: you're the left paddle. Move with your mouse or finger, or W/S or the arrow keys. Like Alcorn's original, where the ball hits your paddle changes the angle, and the ball speeds up during a rally.
Watch a paddle learn: the left paddle starts knowing nothing. It only sees roughly where the ball is compared to itself, and it only gets told "good" when it hits the ball and "bad" when it misses. It tries moves, keeps the ones that paid off, and slowly gets better. Turn on fast forward and watch the hit rate climb. This is a tiny table-based learner, far simpler than DeepMind's 2013 program, which learned from raw pixels with a neural network. Same idea: try, get rewarded, adjust. Hear the episode: History No. 10, Pong. Everything runs in your browser.