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

Why a continuous space?

All the examples that we have seen so far in the book had a discrete action space, so you might have the wrong impression that discrete actions dominate the field. This is a very biased view, of course, and just reflects the selection of domains that we picked our test problems from. Besides Atari games and simple, classic RL problems, there are many tasks that require more than just making a selection from a small and discrete set of things to do.

To give you an example, just imagine a simple robot with only one controllable joint that can be rotated in some range of degrees. Usually, to control a physical joint, you have to specify either the desired position or the force applied.

In both cases, you need to make a decision about a continuous value. This value is fundamentally different from a discrete action space, as the set of values on which you can make a decision is potentially infinite. For instance, you could ask the joint to move to a 13.5&...