Neural networks frequently face long training times based on the corpus of data available to them. Reinforcement learning in particular can take a long time to attain satisfactory performance. Recent efforts to incorporate deterministic logical rules and physical laws into a neural network have met with promising results. From an existing baseline neural network that is designed to learn Pong strictly from pixel representation of the game board, this thesis adds a ball trajectory-based heuristic into the learning process and evaluates its performance. The evaluation initially shows game score improvements, but demonstrates a sharp score degradation after about 25,000 games. Another evaluation shows the heuristic incurs a training time increase of approximately 35%. More work remains for assessing the long-term viability of this approach.
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