Bowling

../../_images/bowling.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/Bowling-v5")

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

Description

Your goal is to score as many points as possible in the game of Bowling. A game consists of 10 frames and you have two tries per frame. Knocking down all pins on the first try is called a “strike”. Knocking down all pins on the second roll is called a “spar”. Otherwise, the frame is called “open”.

For a more detailed documentation, see the AtariAge page

Actions

Bowling 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

UP

3

DOWN

4

UPFIRE

5

DOWNFIRE

See environment specification to see more information on the action meaning.

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 receive points for knocking down pins. The exact score depends on whether you manage a “strike”, “spare” or “open” frame. Moreover, the points you score for one frame may depend on following frames. You can score up to 300 points in one game (if you manage to do 12 strikes). For a more detailed documentation, see the AtariAge page.

Variants

Bowling 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=

Bowling-v0

"rgb"

(2, 5)

0.25

Bowling-ram-v0

"ram"

(2, 5)

0.25

Bowling-ramDeterministic-v0

"ram"

4

0.25

Bowling-ramNoFrameskip-v0

"ram"

1

0.25

BowlingDeterministic-v0

"rgb"

4

0.25

BowlingNoFrameskip-v0

"rgb"

1

0.25

Bowling-v4

"rgb"

(2, 5)

0.0

Bowling-ram-v4

"ram"

(2, 5)

0.0

Bowling-ramDeterministic-v4

"ram"

4

0.0

Bowling-ramNoFrameskip-v4

"ram"

1

0.0

BowlingDeterministic-v4

"rgb"

4

0.0

BowlingNoFrameskip-v4

"rgb"

1

0.0

ALE/Bowling-v5

"rgb"

4

0.25

ALE/Bowling-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, 2, 4]

0

[0, 1]

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 frame-skipping was removed. The environments are now in the “ALE” namespace.

  • v4: Stickiness of actions was removed

  • v0: Initial versions release