Book Image

Hands-On Deep Learning for Games

By : Micheal Lanham
Book Image

Hands-On Deep Learning for Games

By: Micheal Lanham

Overview of this book

The number of applications of deep learning and neural networks has multiplied in the last couple of years. Neural nets has enabled significant breakthroughs in everything from computer vision, voice generation, voice recognition and self-driving cars. Game development is also a key area where these techniques are being applied. This book will give an in depth view of the potential of deep learning and neural networks in game development. We will take a look at the foundations of multi-layer perceptron’s to using convolutional and recurrent networks. In applications from GANs that create music or textures to self-driving cars and chatbots. Then we introduce deep reinforcement learning through the multi-armed bandit problem and other OpenAI Gym environments. As we progress through the book we will gain insights about DRL techniques such as Motivated Reinforcement Learning with Curiosity and Curriculum Learning. We also take a closer look at deep reinforcement learning and in particular the Unity ML-Agents toolkit. By the end of the book, we will look at how to apply DRL and the ML-Agents toolkit to enhance, test and automate your games or simulations. Finally, we will cover your possible next steps and possible areas for future learning.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: The Basics
6
Section 2: Deep Reinforcement Learning
14
Section 3: Building Games

Marathon RL

So far, our focus has been on discrete actions and episodic environments, where the agent often learns to solve a puzzle or accomplish some task. The best examples of such environments are GridWorld, and, of course, the Hallway/VisualHallway samples, where the agent discretely chosses actions such as up, left, down, or right, and, using those actions, has to navigate to some goal. While these are great environments to play with and learn the basic concepts of RL, they can be quite tedious environments to learn from, since results are not often automatic and require extensive exploration. However, in marathon RL environments, the agent is always learning by receiving rewards in the form of control feedback. In fact, this form of RL is analogus to control systems for robotics and simulations. Since these environments are rich with rewards in the form of feedback, they...