Is speed included in the state representation? about minatar

[kenjyoung]

Good Question. No, speed is not included in the state representation, which is one thing that makes most of the environments not entirely Markov. If you wanted to include this information, it would suffice to include the ramp_index variable defined in each environment in the MinAtar/minatar/environments directory, which can be accessed by calling env.difficulty_ramp(). Note that we did not include it in our experiments. Though there's not currently a very elegant way to access this from the environment and gym wrappers.

You can also disable difficulty ramping just by passing difficulty_ramping = False at environment initialization, but not that it is enabled in the included experimental results. This also still does not make the games entirely Markov since the precise timing of movements is also not included in the state representation.