Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On - Second Edition

By : Maxim Lapan
5 (2)
Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On - Second Edition

5 (2)
By: Maxim Lapan

Overview of this book

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition is an updated and expanded version of the bestselling guide to the very latest reinforcement learning (RL) tools and techniques. It provides you with an introduction to the fundamentals of RL, along with the hands-on ability to code intelligent learning agents to perform a range of practical tasks. With six new chapters devoted to a variety of up-to-the-minute developments in RL, including discrete optimization (solving the Rubik's Cube), multi-agent methods, Microsoft's TextWorld environment, advanced exploration techniques, and more, you will come away from this book with a deep understanding of the latest innovations in this emerging field. In addition, you will gain actionable insights into such topic areas as deep Q-networks, policy gradient methods, continuous control problems, and highly scalable, non-gradient methods. You will also discover how to build a real hardware robot trained with RL for less than $100 and solve the Pong environment in just 30 minutes of training using step-by-step code optimization. In short, Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition, is your companion to navigating the exciting complexities of RL as it helps you attain experience and knowledge through real-world examples.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
26
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27
Index

Interactive fiction

As you have already seen, computer games are not only entertaining for humans, but also provide challenging problems for RL researchers due to the complicated observations and action spaces, long sequences of decisions to be made during the gameplay, and natural reward systems.

Arcade games like Atari 2600 are just one of many genres that the gaming industry has. From a historical perspective, the Atari 2600 platform peaked in popularity during the late 70s and early 80s. Then followed the era of Z80 and clones, which evolved into the period of the PC-compatible platforms and consoles we have now.

Over time, computer games continually become more complex, colorful, and detailed in terms of graphics, which inevitably increases hardware requirements. This trend makes it harder for RL researchers and practitioners to apply RL methods to the more recent games; for example, almost everybody can train an RL agent to solve an Atari game, but for StarCraft II, DeepMind...