In this chapter, we learned how the A3C network works. In A3C, Asynchronous implies multiple agents working independently by interacting with multiple copies of the environment, Advantage implies the advantage function, which is the difference between the Q function and the value function, and Actor Critic refers to the Actor Critic network, where the actor network is responsible for generating a policy and the critic network evaluates the policy generated by the actor network. We have seen how A3C works, and saw how to solve a mountain car problem using the algorithm.
In the next chapter, Chapter 11, Policy Gradients and Optimization, we will see policy gradient methods that directly optimize the policy without requiring the Q function.