How do neural networks use genetic algorithms and backpropagation to play games?

Well this is a reinforcement learning problem in which the outputs of the neural network are the keys on the keyboard to be pressed in order to maximize a score given by the fitness function. Using genetic algorithms (GAs) and starting from an initial neural network architecture the GA tends to find a better architecture that maximizes a fitness function, iteratively. The GA generates different architectures by breeding a population of them and then uses them for the task (playing the game), selects the one yielding a higher score (using the fitness function). Next time the GA uses the best architecture candidates (parents in GA terminology) to use for breeding and again repeats the process of generating new population (architectures). Of course, breeding includes mutation too.

This process continues until a termination criteria is met (a specific value for the fitness function or generating a number of populations). You may note that genetic algorithms are very computationally intensive and therefore are kind of abandoned for large-scale problems. Naturally, when a architecture is generated it is trained using backpropagation or any other applicable optimization technique, including GAs.

For instance, this video shows how genetic algorithms help selecting the "best" architecture to play Mario, and it does it very well! However, note that if GA selects an architecture to play Mario very well in one level, that architecture will not be necessarily doing well in next levels as shown in another video. In my opinion, this is because both genetic algorithms and backpropagation tend to find a local minima. So there is still a long way to go ...

Sources

• Genetic Algorithms
• Fitness function
• The paper Evolving Neural Networks through Augmenting Topologies