Book Image

Learn Unity ML-Agents ??? Fundamentals of Unity Machine Learning

Book Image

Learn Unity ML-Agents ??? Fundamentals of Unity Machine Learning

Overview of this book

Unity Machine Learning agents allow researchers and developers to create games and simulations using the Unity Editor, which serves as an environment where intelligent agents can be trained with machine learning methods through a simple-to-use Python API. This book takes you from the basics of Reinforcement and Q Learning to building Deep Recurrent Q-Network agents that cooperate or compete in a multi-agent ecosystem. You will start with the basics of Reinforcement Learning and how to apply it to problems. Then you will learn how to build self-learning advanced neural networks with Python and Keras/TensorFlow. From there you move o n to more advanced training scenarios where you will learn further innovative ways to train your network with A3C, imitation, and curriculum learning models. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build more complex environments by building a cooperative and competitive multi-agent ecosystem.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we took a deep dive into the inner workings of more sophisticated RL algorithms, such as DQN and PPO. We started by walking through the installation of the Python tools and dependencies, where we learned how to use the more basic tools, such as Jupyter Notebook. Then we built a working ML-Agents example that used an external Python agent's brain. After that, we covered the basics of neurons and neural networks. From there, we took a look at DQN and a basic deep Q-learning agent using Keras. We completed the chapter by looking at another RL algorithm called PPO. As we learned, PPO will be the workhorse for many of our complex situations.

Our journey this chapter was more or less a setup for the next chapter, where we start to dig in deep and build on the foundations we laid in this chapter. We will take a closer look at PPO and how it can drive other...