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With the REINFORCE algorithm under our belt, we can finally attempt to start training some models for Connect 4. However, as we’ll see, there are still some hurdles in our way before we get anywhere. It’s good to set your expectations accordingly because rarely if ever do things go smoothly the first time in RL. Runnable Example connect-zero/train/example1-collapse.py A simple MLP model As a fruitfly of Connect 4-playing models, let’s start with a simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) model that follows the model protocol we outlined earlier: that means that it has an input layer taking a 6x7 int8 board state tensor, a few simple hidden layers consisting of just a linear layer and a ReLU activation function each, and an output layer of 7 neurons without any activation function—that’s exactly what we meant earlier when we said that the model should output raw logits. ...

Let’s say we have a Connect 4-playing model and we let it play a couple of games. (We haven’t really talked about model architecture until now, so for now just imagine a simple multilayer perceptron with a few hidden layers which outputs 7 raw logits, as discussed in the previous post.) As it goes in life, our model wins some and loses some. How do we make it actually learn from its experiences? How does the magic happen? ...

Let’s get into a bit more technical detail on how our Connect 4-playing model will be set up, and how a basic game loop works. Throughout all code samples we’ll always assume the standard PyTorch imports: import torch import torch.nn as nn import torch.nn.functional as F Board state The current board state will be represented by a 6x7 PyTorch int8 tensor, initially filled with zeros. board = torch.zeros((ROWS, COLS), dtype=torch.int8, device=DEVICE) The board is ordered such that board[0, :] is the top row. A non-empty cell is represented by +1 or -1. To simplify things, we always represent the player whose move it currently is by +1, and the opponent by -1. This way we don’t need any separate state to keep track of whose move it is. After a move has been made, we simply flip the board by doing ...

For a long time I’ve wanted to get deeper into reinforcement learning (RL), and the project I finally settled on is teaching a neural network model how to play the classic game Connect 4 (pretty sneaky, sis!). Obviously, the name “Connect-Zero” is a cheeky nod to AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero by DeepMind. I chose Connect 4 because it’s a simple game everyone knows how to play where we can hope to achieve good results without expensive hardware and high training costs. ...

The computer opponent is a neural network trained using reinforcement learning. It was exported to ONNX and now runs right here in your browser. See Connect-Zero and the follow-up posts for details. This isn’t a particularly strong model yet: it still has many tactical and strategic blind spots. We’ll train much stronger models over the course of the series.

Now that we have plenty of training data, we can load it into PyTorch and start training a model. Loading the data Since the binary file format we chose was so simple, it’s rather straightforward to write a Dataset class which reads it in: import numpy as np import torch from torch.utils.data import Dataset, DataLoader, Subset class BinaryBezierDataset(Dataset): """ Loads Bezier triangle data from a binary file into memory once. Each record: 11 float32 coords, 32 uint8 bytes (packed 16x16 bitmap). """ def __init__(self, filename, device, input_dim=11): super().__init__() self.filename = filename self.input_dim = input_dim coords_bytes = input_dim * np.dtype(np.float32).itemsize # 44 record_bytes = coords_bytes + 32 # 76 (coords + 16x16 bitmap = 256 bits) # Calculate number of samples from file size file_size = os.path.getsize(filename) if file_size % record_bytes != 0: raise ValueError(f"File size {file_size} not multiple of record size {record_bytes}") self.num_samples = file_size // record_bytes print(f"Found {self.num_samples} samples in {filename}.") with open(filename, 'rb') as f: data = np.fromfile(f, dtype=np.uint8, count=file_size) data = data.reshape(self.num_samples, record_bytes) # reshape into records # Extract coords (first 44 bytes = 11 floats) coords = data[:, :coords_bytes].view(np.float32).reshape(self.num_samples, self.input_dim) # Extract and unpack packed bitmaps (last 32 bytes) packed_bitmaps = data[:, coords_bytes:] unpacked_bits = np.unpackbits(packed_bitmaps, axis=1) # (num_samples, 256) # The actual label is the maximum (0 or 1) over the bitmap bits outputs = np.max(unpacked_bits, axis=1) # (num_samples,) # Convert to pytorch tensors and transfer to GPU if required self.x_tensor = torch.from_numpy(coords).float().to(device) # (num_samples, 11) self.y_tensor = torch.from_numpy(outputs).float().to(device) # (num_samples,) def __len__(self): return self.num_samples def __getitem__(self, idx): return self.x_tensor[idx], self.y_tensor[idx] So far, so good. We are in the convenient position that our entire dataset fits quite comfortably into RAM or VRAM, so we just load the entire dataset at once, extract the 11 triangle coordinates, unpack the bitmap and take its maximum to get a binary 0/1 label which tells us whether the triangle self-intersects. This is a pretty straightforward DataSet which we can load into a nn.DataLoader with the desired batch size and shuffling enabled to feed a standard PyTorch training loop. It’s actually not very efficient to use it like this, but we’ll get to that in a later post. ...

With the triangle self-intersection algorithm ready to go, we can start gathering the training data for our machine learning setup. But first we have to think about how exactly we want to represent it. Canonical triangles The curved triangles we work with are specified by six 3D vectors, so that would mean 18 floating point numbers as our input data. But an important insight is that whether a triangle intersects itself doesn’t change when we rotate it, translate it, or uniformly scale it—it’s well known that affine transformations of spline control points result in affine transformations of the surface itself. ...

In the last post, we found pairs of subtriangles of our curved triangle which intersect. The subtriangles were linear approximations, which means that the intersection points we found are also only approximate. This might be good enough for our purposes, but in the interest of getting training data that’s as accurate as possible, we will refine these intersections by projecting them onto the exact curved triangle. To be precise, we are looking for two distinct parameter pairs \((u_1, v_1)\) and \((u_2, v_2)\) within the triangle’s domain such that their mappings coincide, ...

Before we can apply ML to the triangle problem, we need to be able to compute self-intersections of a curved triangle in an accurate and efficient way so that we can generate enough training data. The basic approach is: Subdivide the curved triangle into smaller subtriangles Find potentially intersecting pairs of subtriangles Check for actual intersections among these candidate pairs Subdividing the triangle We split the original triangle into a list of sufficiently flat subtriangles by a simple recursive procedure, starting with the full triangle {(0,0), (1,0), (0,1)}: ...

As the starting point for a little machine learning project, I chose the following geometric problem. We are given a curved triangle in 3D space. It’s specified via its three vertices plus three additional vector-valued coefficients associated to its three edges. These coefficients are interpreted as control points of a quadratic triangular Bezier surface. Such representations are commonly used in CAD systems to represent curved surfaces. Mathematically speaking, we map parameters \((u,v)\) which lie in the parameter-space triangle \( 0 \le u, v;\ u+v \le 1\) to ...