Understanding the Breakout Environment

We will be training different deep reinforcement learning agents to play the game Breakout in this chapter. Before diving in, let's learn some more about the game.

Breakout is an arcade game designed and released in 1976 by Atari. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, was part of the design and development team. The game was extremely popular at that time and multiple versions were developed over the years.

The goal of the game is to break all the bricks located at the top of the screen with a ball (since the game was developed in 1974 with low screen definition, the ball is represented by pixels and so its shape can be seen as a rectangle in the following screenshot) without dropping it. The player can move a paddle horizontally at the bottom of the screen to hit the ball before it drops and bounce it back toward the bricks. Also, the ball will bounce back after hitting the side walls or the ceiling. The game ends when either the ball...