Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

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

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By: Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani

Overview of this book

Reinforcement learning is one of the most exciting and rapidly growing fields in machine learning. This is due to the many novel algorithms developed and incredible results published in recent years. In this book, you will learn about the core concepts of RL including Q-learning, policy gradients, Monte Carlo processes, and several deep reinforcement learning algorithms. As you make your way through the book, you'll work on projects with datasets of various modalities including image, text, and video. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore technologies such as TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement deep learning reinforcement learning algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience with eight reinforcement learning projects, each addressing different topics and/or algorithms. We hope these practical exercises will provide you with better intuition and insight about the field of reinforcement learning and how to apply its algorithms to various problems in real life.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Summary


This chapter introduced the Gym Minecraft environment, available at https://github.com/tambetm/gym-minecraft. You have learned how to launch a Minecraft mission and how to implement an emulator for it. The most important part of this chapter was the asynchronous reinforcement learning framework. You learned what the shortcomings of DQN are, and why DQN is difficult to apply in complex tasks. Then, you learned how to apply the asynchronous reinforcement learning framework in the actor-critic method REINFORCE, which led us to the A3C algorithm. Finally, you learned how to implement A3C using Tensorflow and how to handle multiple terminals using TMUX. The tricky part in the implementation is that of the global shared parameters. This is related to creating a cluster of TensorFlow servers. For the readers who want to learn more about this, visit https://www.tensorflow.org/deploy/distributed.

In the following chapters, you will learn more about how to apply reinforcement learning algorithms...