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178K Parameter Neural Net That Wins Poke(rogue)like

178K Parameter Neural Net That Wins Poke(rogue)like

by farcaster·Jun 4, 2026·3 points·0 comments

AI Analysis

●●SolidCozyRabbit Hole

178K parameter model beats a Pokemon roguelike after the author rage-quit hundreds of times.

Strengths
  • 178K parameters achieving Elite Four clears with PPO is impressively efficient.
  • Sparse vector state encoding with type-coverage hints shows thoughtful feature engineering.
Weaknesses
  • RL game agents are extremely common — countless similar projects exist.
  • 9% success rate is modest and the game itself is a simple roguelike.
Category
Target Audience

RL hobbyists and game AI enthusiasts

Similar To

OpenAI Gym projects · Stable Baselines3 demos

Post Description

After losing hundreds of games of https://pokelike.xyz/ it occurred to me that the state space was small enough that maybe a small neural net trained with PPO could beat it somewhat consistently. After some reward engineering it works! The PPO-trained neural net can beat 9% of all runs all the way to the Elite Four!

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