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

Summary


In this chapter, we studied reinforcement learning algorithms for one of the most complex and difficult games in the world, Go. In particular, we explored Monte Carlo tree search, a popular algorithm that learns the best moves over time. In AlphaGo, we observed how MCTS can be combined with deep neural networks to make learning more efficient and powerful. Then we investigated how AlphaGo Zero revolutionized Go agents by learning solely and entirely from self-play experience while outperforming all existing Go software and players. We then implemented this algorithm from scratch.

We also implemented AlphaGo Zero, which is the lighter version of AlphaGo since it does not depend on human game data. However, as noted, AlphaGo Zero requires enormous amounts of computational resources. Moreover, as you may have noticed, AlphaGo Zero depends on a myriad of hyperparameters, all of which require fine-tuning. In short, training AlphaGo Zero fully is a prohibitive task. We don't expect the...