Book Image

The Reinforcement Learning Workshop

By : Alessandro Palmas, Emanuele Ghelfi, Dr. Alexandra Galina Petre, Mayur Kulkarni, Anand N.S., Quan Nguyen, Aritra Sen, Anthony So, Saikat Basak
Book Image

The Reinforcement Learning Workshop

By: Alessandro Palmas, Emanuele Ghelfi, Dr. Alexandra Galina Petre, Mayur Kulkarni, Anand N.S., Quan Nguyen, Aritra Sen, Anthony So, Saikat Basak

Overview of this book

Various intelligent applications such as video games, inventory management software, warehouse robots, and translation tools use reinforcement learning (RL) to make decisions and perform actions that maximize the probability of the desired outcome. This book will help you to get to grips with the techniques and the algorithms for implementing RL in your machine learning models. Starting with an introduction to RL, youÔÇÖll be guided through different RL environments and frameworks. YouÔÇÖll learn how to implement your own custom environments and use OpenAI baselines to run RL algorithms. Once youÔÇÖve explored classic RL techniques such as Dynamic Programming, Monte Carlo, and TD Learning, youÔÇÖll understand when to apply the different deep learning methods in RL and advance to deep Q-learning. The book will even help you understand the different stages of machine-based problem-solving by using DARQN on a popular video game Breakout. Finally, youÔÇÖll find out when to use a policy-based method to tackle an RL problem. By the end of The Reinforcement Learning Workshop, youÔÇÖll be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to solve challenging problems using reinforcement learning.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Preface
Free Chapter
2
2. Markov Decision Processes and Bellman Equations

Understanding the Breakout Environment

We will be training different deep reinforcement learning agents to play the game Breakout in this chapter. Before diving in, let's learn some more about the game.

Breakout is an arcade game designed and released in 1976 by Atari. Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, was part of the design and development team. The game was extremely popular at that time and multiple versions were developed over the years.

The goal of the game is to break all the bricks located at the top of the screen with a ball (since the game was developed in 1974 with low screen definition, the ball is represented by pixels and so its shape can be seen as a rectangle in the following screenshot) without dropping it. The player can move a paddle horizontally at the bottom of the screen to hit the ball before it drops and bounce it back toward the bricks. Also, the ball will bounce back after hitting the side walls or the ceiling. The game ends when either the ball...