Book Image

TensorFlow Reinforcement Learning Quick Start Guide

By : Kaushik Balakrishnan
Book Image

TensorFlow Reinforcement Learning Quick Start Guide

By: Kaushik Balakrishnan

Overview of this book

Advances in reinforcement learning algorithms have made it possible to use them for optimal control in several different industrial applications. With this book, you will apply Reinforcement Learning to a range of problems, from computer games to autonomous driving. The book starts by introducing you to essential Reinforcement Learning concepts such as agents, environments, rewards, and advantage functions. You will also master the distinctions between on-policy and off-policy algorithms, as well as model-free and model-based algorithms. You will also learn about several Reinforcement Learning algorithms, such as SARSA, Deep Q-Networks (DQN), Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG), Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C), Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). The book will also show you how to code these algorithms in TensorFlow and Python and apply them to solve computer games from OpenAI Gym. Finally, you will also learn how to train a car to drive autonomously in the Torcs racing car simulator. By the end of the book, you will be able to design, build, train, and evaluate feed-forward neural networks and convolutional neural networks. You will also have mastered coding state-of-the-art algorithms and also training agents for various control problems.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Getting introduced to the Atari environment

The Atari 2600 game suite was originally released in the 1970s, and was a big hit at that time. It involves several games that are played by users using the keyboard to enter actions. These games were a big hit back in the day, and inspired many computer game players of the 1970s and 1980s, but are considered too primitive by today's video game players' standards. However, they are popular today in the RL community as a portal to games that can be trained by RL agents.

Summary of Atari games

Here is a summary of a select few games from Atari (we won't present screenshots of the games for copyright reasons, but will provide links to them).

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