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

The environment

At the time of writing, the TextWorld environment supports only Linux and macOS platforms and internally relies on the Inform 7 system (http://inform7.com). There are two webpages for the project: one is the Microsoft Research webpage: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/textworld/, which contains general information about the environment, and the another is on GitHub (https://github.com/microsoft/TextWorld) and describes installation and usage. Let's start with installation.

Installation

The installation instructions suggest that you can install the package by just typing pip install textworld in your Python virtual environment, but at the time of writing, this step is broken by a changed URL for the Inform 7 engine. Hopefully, this will be fixed on the next TextWorld release, but if you experience any issues, you can set up a version that I've tested for this example by running pip install git+https://github.com/microsoft/TextWorld@f1ac489fefeb6a48684ed1f89422b84b7b4a6e4b...