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)

Introduction to Intelligent Agents and Learning Environments

Greetings! Welcome to the first chapter of this book. This book will introduce you to the awesome OpenAI Gym learning environment and guide you through an exciting journey to get you equipped with enough skills to train state-of-the-art, artificial intelligence agent-based systems. This book will help you develop hands-on experience with reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning through practical projects ranging from developing an autonomous, self-driving car to developing Atari game-playing agents that can surpass human performance. By the time you complete the book, you will be in a position to explore the endless possibilities of using artificial intelligence to solve algorithmic tasks, play games, and fix control problems.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Understanding intelligent agents and learning environments
  • Understanding what OpenAI Gym is all about
  • Different categories of tasks/environments that are available, with a brief description of what each category is suitable for
  • Understanding the key features of OpenAI Gym
  • Getting an idea about what you can do with the OpenAI Gym toolkit
  • Creating and visualizing your first Gym environment

Let's start our journey by understanding what an intelligent agent is.