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 RL libraries?

Our implementation of basic DQN in Chapter 6, Deep Q-Networks wasn't very, long and complicated—about 200 lines of training code plus 120 lines in environment wrappers. When you are becoming familiar with RL methods, it is very useful to implement everything yourself to understand how things actually work. However, the more involved you become in the field, the more often you will realize that you are writing the same code over and over again.

This repetition comes from the generality of RL methods. As we already discussed in Chapter 1, What Is Reinforcement Learning?, RL is quite flexible and many real-life problems fall into the environment-agent interaction scheme. RL methods don't make many assumptions about the specifics of observations and actions, so code implemented for the CartPole environment will be applicable to Atari games (maybe with some minor tweaks).

Writing the same code over and over again is not very efficient, as bugs might...