Regarding the breakout AI, I think you could somewhat easily train an AI that was robust to such changes, for example by randomizing the paddle shape in trainin

Regarding the breakout AI, I think you could somewhat easily train an AI that was robust to such changes, for example by randomizing the paddle shape in training. But if you train an AI on a more specific version I wouldn't expect it to magically learn the more general problem. In fact I'd argue it's unfair to expect an AI to automatically generalize without attempting to train it for that. The only reason humans can quickly learn many games is that they've been exposed to a variety of tasks throughout their lives, as well as the fact that we have innate biases that we might use when designing games by humans for humans.