Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By : Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani
Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By: Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani

Overview of this book

Reinforcement learning is one of the most exciting and rapidly growing fields in machine learning. This is due to the many novel algorithms developed and incredible results published in recent years. In this book, you will learn about the core concepts of RL including Q-learning, policy gradients, Monte Carlo processes, and several deep reinforcement learning algorithms. As you make your way through the book, you'll work on projects with datasets of various modalities including image, text, and video. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore technologies such as TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement deep learning reinforcement learning algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience with eight reinforcement learning projects, each addressing different topics and/or algorithms. We hope these practical exercises will provide you with better intuition and insight about the field of reinforcement learning and how to apply its algorithms to various problems in real life.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Building an Atari emulator


OpenAI gym provides an Atari 2600 game environment with a Python interface. The games are simulated by the arcade learning environment, which uses the Stella Atari emulator. For more details, read the following papers:

  • MG Bellemare, Y Naddaf, J Veness, and M Bowling, The arcade learning environment: An evaluation platform for general agents, journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2012)
  • Stella: A Multi-Platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator, http://stella.sourceforge.net/

Getting started

If you don't have a full install of OpenAI gym, you can install the Atari environment dependencies via the following:

pip install gym[atari]

This requires the cmake tools. This command will automatically compile the arcade learning environment and its Python interface, atari-py. The compilation will take a few minutes on a common laptop, so go have a cup of coffee.

After the Atari environment is installed, try the following:

import gym
atari = gym.make('Breakout-v0')
atari.reset()
atari...