Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
I spent a year building an AI to master the hardest version of Tempest ever made… and yesterday it beat my official world record. What started as a stubborn engineering experiment turned into a full-blown machine learning breakthrough, complete with 15 million frames of gameplay, a custom MAME socket bridge, prioritized replay, and the two changes that finally cracked the plateau: attention and polar coordinates. Here’s how a 1-million-parameter model went from clueless to superhuman — and what it taught me about building AI that actually works.
Live Training Dashboard: http://davepl.com:8765
I spent a year building an AI to master the hardest version of Tempest ever made… and yesterday it beat my official world record. What started as a stubborn engineering experiment turned into a full-blown machine learning breakthrough, complete with 15 million frames of gameplay, a custom MAME socket bridge, prioritized replay, and the two changes that finally cracked the plateau: attention and polar coordinates. Here’s how a 1-million-parameter model went from clueless to superhuman — and what it taught me about building AI that actually works.
Live Training Dashboard: http://davepl.com:8765
