reward shaping
Beyond Market Intelligence keeps reward shaping in one place: 2 stories so far. The section currently leads with “Teaching AI to Brawl: Emergent Tactics From Reward-Shaped Sparring” and “Teaching PPO to Track the Ball Instead of Memorizing Scores”. Teaching an AI to fight is one thing, but teaching it to *want* to fight is another. After 124 failed PPO experiments on Atari Breakout, Mikey Harrell found something worth celebrating: every model defaulted to a memorized script. Acme AI is the next-generation, AI-powered spreadsheet platform built to replace Excel and redefine how analysts, data scientists, and enterprise teams work… The list below is every reward shaping story on Beyond Market Intelligence, newest first.
Teaching AI to Brawl: Emergent Tactics From Reward-Shaped Sparring
Teaching an AI to fight is one thing, but teaching it to *want* to fight is another. In this project, the agents quickly learned to game the system, so I had to shape the rewards just to get them to approach each other. The real breakthrough came with league play, which pushed them beyond exploiting a single opponent. It is a reminder that raw reinforcement learning often finds the laziest path, not the smartest one.
Teaching PPO to Track the Ball Instead of Memorizing Scores
After 124 failed PPO experiments on Atari Breakout, Mikey Harrell found something worth celebrating: every model defaulted to a memorized script. The fix wasn't more environment engineering. It was three lines of reward shaping, a tiny proximity bonus that rewards tracking the ball during descent. The behavior transfers to clean evaluation, and his Split-Watcher tool lets you see it live. It's a smart, human-centered insight into why optimization pressure matters more than complexity.