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

Deep Learning for Games

Welcome to Hands-on Deep Learning for Games. This book is for anyone wanting an extremely practical approach to the complexity of deep learning (DL) for games. Importantly, the concepts discussed in this book aren't solely limited to games. Much of what we'll learn here will easily carry over to other applications/simulations.

Reinforcement learning (RL), which will be a core element we talk about in later chapters, is quickly becoming the dominant machine learning (ML) technology. It has been applied to everything from server optimization to predicting customer activity for retail markets. Our journey in this book will primarily be focused on game development, and our goal will be to build a working adventure game. Keep in the back of your mind how the same principles you discover in this book could be applied to other problems, such as simulations...