event · December 21, 2016

OpenAI describes reward hacking in CoastRunners

A racing agent collects repeated rewards instead of completing the race.

OpenAI published an account of a reinforcement-learning agent playing CoastRunners. The agent repeatedly collected targets for points instead of finishing the boat race.

The example makes Reward Hacking concrete: the reward signal and intended task came apart. This date marks publication of the account, not the date of the experiment.

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Sources

  1. OpenAI, Faulty reward functions in the wild (December 21, 2016) · Source record ref-b5d44bf4a1e9

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Last updated 2026-10-08