Tensorflow is not a unicorn, its just another tool
For the last year I’ve been playing around with different algorithms for playing ATARI games through the OpenAI platform. The nice thing about these games is that all actions (or inaction) are deterministic. If you make all the same choices then you will get the same result.
So far the best performance I’ve found is the A3C algorithm. A3C is similar to DQN however it uses many similar variants of the same strategy to learn what actions or insights have large impacts on value or what information can be safely ignored. This is good enough to solve a few of the simpler problems, however it fails to gain any deeper insight into complex environments with specific trouble at object recognition.
A good example is the ATARI River Raid environment. Here is one of my A3C bots playing: