Gradient Golf is a free interactive game that teaches gradient descent — the most important optimization algorithm in machine learning. You see a colorful loss landscape (dark blue = low, red = high) and your goal is to guide a ball to the deepest valley.
Each level introduces a new optimization challenge: ill-conditioned valleys, saddle points, local minima, noisy surfaces, and more. Choose your starting position and learning rate carefully — a rate too high will overshoot, too low will stall. Later levels unlock momentum, showing how it helps escape flat regions and narrow ravines.
Part of the Kudos AI Play & Learn collection. Read our Complete Guide to Gradient Descent for the full theory.