Greetings all! You might know me from my Snake AI ablation series where I spent an unreasonable amount of time teaching a snake to eat apples. This is a new series. Same researcher, different game, significantly worse life decisions.
This post is about Tetris. Specifically, about building what is, to our knowledge, the first AI agent to play frame-by-frame NES Tetris from raw pixels with no handcrafted observations, no shaped rewards, no enumerated placements, and no warm-start (and I mean that scoped to frame-level control from pixels, not as a field-wide claim). Button presses in, pixels out, reward only.
At its peak it reached NES level 21.
Then it started aiming pieces directly into the stack on purpose. And when I tried to fix that, everything got worse.
That's the post.
