Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning

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

Python Reinforcement Learning

By: Sudharsan Ravichandiran, Sean Saito, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani, Yang Wenzhuo

Overview of this book

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the trending and most promising branch of artificial intelligence. This Learning Path will help you master not only the basic reinforcement learning algorithms but also the advanced deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The Learning Path starts with an introduction to RL followed by OpenAI Gym, and TensorFlow. You will then explore various RL algorithms, such as Markov Decision Process, Monte Carlo methods, and dynamic programming, including value and policy iteration. You'll also work on various datasets including image, text, and video. This example-rich guide will introduce you to deep RL algorithms, such as Dueling DQN, DRQN, A3C, PPO, and TRPO. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. You will also learn about imagination-augmented agents, learning from human preference, DQfD, HER, and many of the recent advancements in RL. By the end of the Learning Path, you will have all the knowledge and experience needed to implement RL and deep RL in your projects, and you enter the world of artificial intelligence to solve various real-life problems. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python by Sudharsan Ravichandiran • Python Reinforcement Learning Projects by Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, and Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Experiments


The full implementation of the A3C algorithm can be downloaded from our GitHub repository (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Python-Reinforcement-Learning-Projects). There are three environments in our implementation we can test. The first one is the special game, demo, introduced in Chapter 7, Playing Atari Games. For this game, A3C only needs to launch two agents to achieve good performance. Run the following command in the src folder:

python3 train.py -w 2 -e demo

The first argument, -w, or --num_workers, indicates the number of launched agents. The second argument, -e, or --env, specifies the environment, for example, demo. The other two environments are Atari and Minecraft. For Atari games, A3C requires at least 8 agents running in parallel. Typically, launching 16 agents can achieve better performance:

python3 train.py -w 8 -e Breakout

For Breakout, A3C takes about 2-3 hours to achieve a score of 300. If you have a decent PC with more than 8 cores, it is better to test it...