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

More foundations of learning

There is an ever-growing resource for learning about machine learning, DL, and of course DLR. The list is becoming very large, and there are many materials to choose from. For that reason, we will now summarize the areas we feel show the most promise for developing AI and DL for games:

  • Basic Data Science Course: If you have never taken a basic fundamentals course on data science, then you certainly should. The foundations of understanding the qualities of data, statistics, probability, and variability are too numerous to mention. Be sure to cover this foundation first.
  • Probabilistic Programming: This is a combination of various variational inference methods by which to answer problems given a probability of events with an answer of the probability that some event may occur. These types of models and languages have been used to analyze financial information...