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

Actor-Critic and continuous action spaces

Another complexity we introduced when looking at marathon RL or control learning was the introduction of continuous action spaces. Continuous action spaces represent a set of infinite possible actions an agent could take. Where our agent could previously favor a discrete action, yes or no, it now has to select some points within an infinite space of actions as an action for each joint. This mapping from an infinite action space to an action is not easy to solve—however, we do have neural networks at our disposal, and these provide us with an excellent solution using an architecture not unlike the GANs we looked at in Chapter 3, GAN for Games.

As we discovered in the chapter on GANs, we could propose a network architecture composed of two competing networks. These competing networks would force each network to learn by competing...