Failing to solve Manic Miner with RL

Around 10 years ago Google DeepMind showed that you could use deep reinforcement learning to play video games. It’s something that I found fascinating at the time and wanted to try but never had the time to really look into it. With LLMs now being able to do a lot of the heavy lifting for me, I’ve started to work through my backlog of “this is interesting - I’d like to try it out”. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and my childhood computer was the ZX Spectrum, and my ESP32 Rainbow project has given me a nice emulator that I can use to both play games and experiment with. Manic Miner was one of the first games we purchased and I wasted a lot of time playing it. I have vague memories of progressing reasonably far, but never actually completing the game. So I naively thought - Reinforcement Learning - why not? Some cursory googling would have told me it was not suitable, but I’ve never really been one for doing a lot of up-front research before diving in. The emulator that I have for the…

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