Space Mice

One intergalactic cat protecting outer space from an onslaught of rodents.

About the Game

Space Mice is a version of a simple scroller in which a cat has to shoot lasers to save the world from invading space mice (as well as asteroids, shooting stars, and more). The game was developed before the advent of OpenAI gym to have access to the internal dynamics of a scroller game for the purpose of developing reinforcement learning algorithms. It was meant to combine serious research with a game that was fun and easy to play and thus could be demo’ed during outreach events. The RL algorithm used is a tiled version of Bayesian Q-learning that learns optimal strategies based on the position of the closest object to the cat at any given time.