Book Image

Hands-On Intelligent Agents with OpenAI Gym

By : Palanisamy P
Book Image

Hands-On Intelligent Agents with OpenAI Gym

By: Palanisamy P

Overview of this book

Many real-world problems can be broken down into tasks that require a series of decisions to be made or actions to be taken. The ability to solve such tasks without a machine being programmed requires a machine to be artificially intelligent and capable of learning to adapt. This book is an easy-to-follow guide to implementing learning algorithms for machine software agents in order to solve discrete or continuous sequential decision making and control tasks. Hands-On Intelligent Agents with OpenAI Gym takes you through the process of building intelligent agent algorithms using deep reinforcement learning starting from the implementation of the building blocks for configuring, training, logging, visualizing, testing, and monitoring the agent. You will walk through the process of building intelligent agents from scratch to perform a variety of tasks. In the closing chapters, the book provides an overview of the latest learning environments and learning algorithms, along with pointers to more resources that will help you take your deep reinforcement learning skills to the next level.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Understanding the Gym interface

Let's continue our Gym exploration by understanding the interface between the Gym environment and the agents that we will develop. To help us with that, let's have another look at the picture we saw in Chapter 2, Reinforcement Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning, when we were discussing the basics of reinforcement learning:

Did the picture give you an idea about the interface between the agent and the environment? We will make your understanding secure by going over the description of the interface.

After we import gym , we make an environment using the following line of code:

 env = gym.make("ENVIRONMENT_NAME") 

Here, ENVIRONMENT_NAME is the name of the environment we want, chosen from the list of the environments we found installed on our system. From the previous diagram, we can see that the first arrow comes from the...