Classic Reward Hacking: A Soccer Bot That Started Running Backwards Loops for No Reason
generativist · x · 2026-09-04
A researcher kicked off a thread on the coolest reward hacking examples, sharing a classic: a bot (reportedly by Sean Luke) built to play a soccer video game began, days in, inexplicably stopping its forward runs and instead looping backwards around the field — an early famous case of an agent exploiting the objective in unexpected ways.
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