Book Image

Hands-On Reinforcement Learning for Games

By : Micheal Lanham
Book Image

Hands-On Reinforcement Learning for Games

By: Micheal Lanham

Overview of this book

With the increased presence of AI in the gaming industry, developers are challenged to create highly responsive and adaptive games by integrating artificial intelligence into their projects. This book is your guide to learning how various reinforcement learning techniques and algorithms play an important role in game development with Python. Starting with the basics, this book will help you build a strong foundation in reinforcement learning for game development. Each chapter will assist you in implementing different reinforcement learning techniques, such as Markov decision processes (MDPs), Q-learning, actor-critic methods, SARSA, and deterministic policy gradient algorithms, to build logical self-learning agents. Learning these techniques will enhance your game development skills and add a variety of features to improve your game agent’s productivity. As you advance, you’ll understand how deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques can be used to devise strategies to help agents learn from their actions and build engaging games. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to apply reinforcement learning techniques to build a variety of projects and contribute to open source applications.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Exploring the Environment
7
Section 2: Exploiting the Knowledge
15
Section 3: Reward Yourself

Exploiting ML-Agents

At some point, we need to move beyond building and training agent algorithms and explore building our own environments. Building your own environments will also give you more experience in making good reward functions. We have virtually omitted this important question in Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and that is what makes a good reward function.

In this chapter, we will look to answer the question of what makes a good reward function or what a reward function is. We will talk about reward functions by building new environments with the Unity game engine. We will start by installing and setting up Unity ML-Agents, an advanced DRL kit for building agents and environments. From there, we will look at how to build one of the standard Unity demo environments for our use with our PyTorch models. Conveniently, this leads us...