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 MAgent environment

Before we jump into our first MARL example, I will describe our environment to experiment with.

Installation

If you want to play with MARL, your choice is a bit limited. All the environments that come with Gym support only one agent. There are some patches for Atari Pong, to switch it into two-player mode, but they are not standard and are an exception rather than the rule.

DeepMind, together with Blizzard, has made StarCraft II publicly available (https://github.com/deepmind/pysc2) and it makes for a very interesting and challenging environment for experimentation. However, for somebody who is taking their first steps in MARL, it might be too complex. In that regard, I found the MAgent environment from Geek.AI (https://github.com/geek-ai/MAgent) perfectly suitable: it is simple, fast, and has minimal dependency, but it still allows you to simulate different multi-agent scenarios for experimentation. It doesn't provide a Gym-compatible API, but...