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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Index

The Rubik's Cube and combinatorial optimization

I doubt it's possible to find a person who hasn't heard about the Rubik's Cube, so I'm not going to repeat the Wikipedia description (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Cube) of this puzzle, but rather focus on the connections it has to mathematics and computer science. If it's not explicitly stated, by "cube" I mean the 3×3 classic Rubik's Cube. There are lots of variations based on the original 3×3 puzzle, but they are still far less popular than the classic invention.

Despite being quite simple in terms of mechanics and the task at hand, the cube is quite a tricky object in terms of all the transformations we can make by possible rotations of its sides. It was calculated that in total, the cube has ~4.33 × 1019 distinct states reachable by rotating it. That's only the states that are reachable without disassembling the cube; by taking it apart and then assembling...