Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On

By : Maxim Lapan
Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On

By: Maxim Lapan

Overview of this book

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On is a comprehensive guide to the very latest DL tools and their limitations. You will evaluate methods including Cross-entropy and policy gradients, before applying them to real-world environments. Take on both the Atari set of virtual games and family favorites such as Connect4. The book provides an introduction to the basics of RL, giving you the know-how to code intelligent learning agents to take on a formidable array of practical tasks. Discover how to implement Q-learning on 'grid world' environments, teach your agent to buy and trade stocks, and find out how natural language models are driving the boom in chatbots.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On
Contributors
Preface
Other Books You May Enjoy
Index

Cross-entropy on FrozenLake


The next environment we'll try to solve using the cross-entropy method is FrozenLake. Its world is from the so-called "grid world" category, when your agent lives in a grid of size 4 × 4 and can move in four directions: up, down, left, and right. The agent always starts at a top-left position, and its goal is to reach the bottom-right cell of the grid. There are holes in the fixed cells of the grid and if you get into those holes, the episode ends and your reward is zero. If the agent reaches the destination cell, then it obtains the reward 1.0 and the episode ends.

To make life more complicated, the world is slippery (it's a frozen lake after all), so the agent's actions do not always turn out as expected: there is a 33% chance that it will slip to the right or to the left. You want the agent to move left, for example, but there is a 33% probability that it will indeed move left, a 33% chance that it will end up in the cell above, and a 33% chance that it will...