Journal · Notes from the archive

Notes from the archive.

← All postsEnvironments · Aug 2026

Flappy Bird is our game lab

A deterministic world, exact actions, and a live player base: the simplest possible RL environment with real human baselines.

We relaunched Flappy Bird in 2026 and have recorded runs since July: the seed and every flap.

Because the world is deterministic, a seed and a list of flaps replay a run exactly. That makes it a clean environment for control and world-model research, with a human score distribution from people who chose to play.

We use it to test every part of our pipeline before we roll it out to bigger games.