Playing FlappyBird with AI

Program Members

• Xagen Mclaughlin, 6th grade student at Kenilworth Science and Technology School (KST), 3rd place winner in Louisiana State Science & Engineering Fair, 2022
• Mr. Elkhan Akhundov, Advisor at KST
• Dr. Hao Wang, Advisor at LSU

Objectives

We develop smart AIs to play the classic game FlappyBird. Through this project, the participating student is expected to learn and experience:

• How AI understands the real world using computer vision techniques
• How AI makes decisions to achieve the highest score in games
• How to understand AI’s behaviors and performance
• What knowledge we need to develop better AIs

Roadmap

1. Setup the game environment
2. Learn about basic reinforcement learning (RL) strategies
3. Deploy a simple RL-based AI to play the game
4. Analyze the AI’s performance and explain its behaviors
5. Develop a new AI to improve its performance
6. Compare and analyze different AIs’ performance
7. Project demo and competition between AI and human

FlappyBird played by Reinforcement Learning.