Beetle-Race. (Unscientific) Visualization of Reinforcement Learning
An AI experiment: Watch beetles learn how to crawl through a small racetrack.
Beetle-Race. (Unscientific) Visualization of Reinforcement Learning launched on June 3, 2018 with 7 votes, #1,007 of 2,653 launches that month and more than 50% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 8 years on.
What it does
Below you can see a simple game: Ten lady beetle on a racetrack 🏎. Each of the ladybugs starts with 1000 points. It crawls from the top left and has to move to the finish on the bottom left. If it finishes, it wins 5 points and is placed again at the start line. If it runs into a wall, it loses 1 point . The small numbers next to the icon show the current score. The best beetle is marked with a star. At the beginning they are plain stupid: They run in a circle or hit the walls 🤕. After about 15 minutes (depending on your computer's speed) it learns what to do thanks to the set incentives. It will try to avoid running into walls (because this causes a penalty of one point). And it will try…from xn--mhlemann-65a.ch
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