An Exploration of Deep Learning Methods in Hungry Geese

Abstract: Hungry Geese is a n-player variation of the popular game snake. This paper looks at state of the art Deep Reinforcement Learning Value Methods. The goal of the paper is to aggregate research of value based methods and apply it as an exercise to other environments. A vanilla Deep Q Network, a Double Q-network and a Dueling Q-Network were all examined and tested with the Hungry Geese environment. The best performing model was the vanilla Deep Q Network due to its simple state representation and smaller network structure. Converging towards an optimal policy was found to be difficult due to random geese initialization and food generation. Therefore we show that Deep Q Networks may not be the appropriate model for such a stochastic environment and lastly we present improvements that can be made along with more suitable models for the environment.