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.

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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Get in touch
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: The Basics
Section 1: The Basics
2
Deep Learning for Games
Deep Learning for Games
The past, present, and future of DL
Neural networks – the foundation
Multilayer perceptron in TF
TensorFlow Basics
Training neural networks with backpropagation
Building an autoencoder with Keras
Exercises
Summary
3
Convolutional and Recurrent Networks
Convolutional and Recurrent Networks
Convolutional neural networks
Understanding convolution
Building a self-driving CNN
Memory and recurrent networks
Playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with LSTMs
Exercises
Summary
4
GAN for Games
GAN for Games
Introducing GANs
Coding a GAN in Keras
Wasserstein GAN
Generating textures with a GAN
A GAN for creating music
Exercises
Summary
5
Building a Deep Learning Gaming Chatbot
Building a Deep Learning Gaming Chatbot
Neural conversational agents
Sequence-to-sequence learning
DeepPavlov
Building the chatbot server
Running the chatbot in Unity
Exercises
Summary
6
Section 2: Deep Reinforcement Learning
Section 2: Deep Reinforcement Learning
7
Introducing DRL
Introducing DRL
Reinforcement learning
RL with the OpenAI Gym
A Q-Learning model
First DRL with Deep Q-learning
RL experiments
Exercises
Summary
8
Unity ML-Agents
Unity ML-Agents
Installing ML-Agents
Training an agent
What's in a brain?
Monitoring training with TensorBoard
Running an agent
Exercises
Summary
9
Agent and the Environment
Agent and the Environment
Exploring the training environment
Understanding state
Understanding visual state
Convolution and visual state
Recurrent networks for remembering series
Exercises
Summary
10
Understanding PPO
Understanding PPO
Marathon RL
The partially observable Markov decision process
Actor-Critic and continuous action spaces
Understanding TRPO and PPO
Learning to tune PPO
Exercises
Summary
11
Rewards and Reinforcement Learning
Rewards and Reinforcement Learning
Rewards and reward functions
Sparsity of rewards
Curriculum Learning
Understanding Backplay
Curiosity Learning
Exercises
Summary
12
Imitation and Transfer Learning
Imitation and Transfer Learning
IL, or behavioral cloning
Online training
Offline training
Transfer learning
Imitation Transfer Learning
Exercises
Summary
13
Building Multi-Agent Environments
Building Multi-Agent Environments
Adversarial and cooperative self-play
Adversarial self-play
Multi-brain play
Adding individuality with intrinsic rewards
Extrinsic rewards for individuality
Exercises
Summary
14
Section 3: Building Games
Section 3: Building Games
15
Debugging/Testing a Game with DRL
Debugging/Testing a Game with DRL
Introducing the game
Setting up ML-Agents
Overriding the Unity input system
Testing through imitation
Analyzing the testing process
Exercises
Summary
16
Obstacle Tower Challenge and Beyond
Obstacle Tower Challenge and Beyond
The Unity Obstacle Tower Challenge
Deep Learning for your game?
Building your game
More foundations of learning
Summary
17
Other Books You May Enjoy
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What's in a brain?

One of the brilliant aspects of the ML-Agents platform is the ability to switch from player control to AI/agent control very quickly and seamlessly. In order to do this, Unity uses the concept of a brain. A brain may be either player-controlled, a player brain, or agent-controlled, a learning brain. The brilliant part is that you can build a game and test it, as a player can then turn the game loose on an RL agent. This has the added benefit of making any game written in Unity controllable by an AI with very little effort. In fact, this is such a powerful workflow that we will spend an entire chapter, Chapter 12, Debugging/Testing a Game with DRL, on testing and debugging your games with RL.

Training an RL agent with Unity is fairly straightforward to set up and run. Unity uses Python externally to build the learning brain model. Using Python makes far...

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