Training a Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent to Play Snake

Those of us who have ever used a Nokia mobile phone two decades ago will remember the Snake game that was first introduced on the Nokia 6110. An adaption of an arcade game from 1976, it eventually found itself on 400 million phones. Indeed, there is even a "World Snake Day" for nostalgic fans to remember this bygone era. But can you train a deep reinforcement learning agent to play the game? Data scientist Hennie de Harder decided to find out and chronicled her journey of pitting an agent against a Python version of the game in a blog post on Towards Data Science. One of three basic machine learning paradigms, reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning concerned with software agents that take action based on maximizing predefined rewards.