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

Solving Frozen Lake Using Monte Carlo

Frozen Lake is another simple game found in the OpenAI framework. This is a classic game where you can do sampling and simulations for Monte Carlo reinforcement learning. We have already described and used the Frozen Lake environment in Chapter 05, Dynamic Programming. Here we shall quickly revise the basics of the game so that we can solve it using Monte Carlo methods in the upcoming activity.

We have a 4x4 grid of cells, which is the entire frozen lake. It contains 16 cells (a 4x4 grid). The cells are marked as S – Start, F – Frozen, H – Hole, and G – Goal. The player needs to move from the Start cell, S, to the Goal cell, along with the Frozen areas (F cells), without falling into Holes (H cells). The following figure visually presents the aforementioned information:

Figure 6.10: The Frozen Lake game

Here are some basic details of the game:

  • The aim of the game: The aim of the game...