Pong

../../../_images/pong.gif

This environment is part of the Atari environments. Please read that page first for general information.

Action Space

Discrete(6)

Observation Space

Box(0, 255, (210, 160, 3), uint8)

Import

gymnasium.make("ALE/Pong-v5")

For more Pong variants with different observation and action spaces, see the variants section.

Description

You control the right paddle, you compete against the left paddle controlled by the computer. You each try to keep deflecting the ball away from your goal and into your opponent’s goal.

For a more detailed documentation, see the AtariAge page

Actions

Pong has the action space of Discrete(6) with the table below listing the meaning of each action’s meanings. To enable all 18 possible actions that can be performed on an Atari 2600, specify full_action_space=True during initialization or by passing full_action_space=True to gymnasium.make.

Value

Meaning

Value

Meaning

Value

Meaning

0

NOOP

1

FIRE

2

RIGHT

3

LEFT

4

RIGHTFIRE

5

LEFTFIRE

Observations

Atari environments have three possible observation types: "rgb", "grayscale" and "ram".

  • obs_type="rgb" -> observation_space=Box(0, 255, (210, 160, 3), np.uint8)

  • obs_type="ram" -> observation_space=Box(0, 255, (128,), np.uint8)

  • obs_type="grayscale" -> Box(0, 255, (210, 160), np.uint8), a grayscale version of the “rgb” type

See variants section for the type of observation used by each environment id by default.

Rewards

You get score points for getting the ball to pass the opponent’s paddle. You lose points if the ball passes your paddle. For a more detailed documentation, see the AtariAge page.

Variants

Pong has the following variants of the environment id which have the following differences in observation, the number of frame-skips and the repeat action probability.

Env-id

obs_type=

frameskip=

repeat_action_probability=

Pong-v0

"rgb"

(2, 5)

0.25

Pong-ram-v0

"ram"

(2, 5)

0.25

Pong-ramDeterministic-v0

"ram"

4

0.25

Pong-ramNoFrameskip-v0

"ram"

1

0.25

PongDeterministic-v0

"rgb"

4

0.25

PongNoFrameskip-v0

"rgb"

1

0.25

Pong-v4

"rgb"

(2, 5)

0.0

Pong-ram-v4

"ram"

(2, 5)

0.0

Pong-ramDeterministic-v4

"ram"

4

0.0

Pong-ramNoFrameskip-v4

"ram"

1

0.0

PongDeterministic-v4

"rgb"

4

0.0

PongNoFrameskip-v4

"rgb"

1

0.0

ALE/Pong-v5

"rgb"

4

0.25

ALE/Pong-ram-v5

"ram"

4

0.25

Difficulty and modes

It is possible to specify various flavors of the environment via the keyword arguments difficulty and mode. A flavor is a combination of a game mode and a difficulty setting. The table below lists the possible difficulty and mode values along with the default values.

Available Modes

Default Mode

Available Difficulties

Default Difficulty

[0, 1]

0

[0, 1, 2, 3]

0

Version History

A thorough discussion of the intricate differences between the versions and configurations can be found in the general article on Atari environments.

  • v5: Stickiness was added back and stochastic frameskipping was removed. The environments are now in the “ALE” namespace.

  • v4: Stickiness of actions was removed

  • v0: Initial versions release