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

First DRL with Deep Q-learning

Now that we understand the reinforcement learning process in detail, we can look to adapt our Q-learning model to work with deep learning. This, as you could likely guess, is the culmination of our efforts and where the true power of RL shines. As we learned through earlier chapters, deep learning is essentially a complex system of equations that can map inputs through a non-linear function to generate a trained output.

A neural network is just another, simpler method of solving a non-linear equation. We will look at how to use DNN to solve other equations later, but for now we will focus on using it to solve the Q-learning equation we saw in the previous section.

We will use the CartPole training environment from the OpenAI Gym toolkit. This environment is pretty much the standard used to learn Deep Q-learning (DQN).

Open up Chapter_5_4.py and...