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)
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Index

The AlphaGo Zero method

In this section, we will discuss the structure of the method. The whole system contains several parts that need to be understood before we can implement them.

Overview

At a high level, the method consists of three components, all of which will be explained in detail later, so don't worry if something is not completely clear from this section:

  • We constantly traverse the game tree using the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm, the core idea of which is to semi-randomly walk down the game states, expanding them and gathering statistics about the frequency of moves and underlying game outcomes. As the game tree is huge, both in terms of the depth and width, we don't try to build the full tree; we just randomly sample its most promising paths (that's the source of the method's name).
  • At every moment, we have a best player, which is the model used to generate the data via self-play. Initially, this model has random weights...