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

Playing with policy versus value iteration

Policy and value iteration methods are quite similar and looked at as companion methods. As such, to evaluate which method to use, we often need to apply both methods to the problem in question. In the next exercise, we will evaluate both policy and value iteration methods side by side in the FrozenLake environment:

  1. Open the Chapter_2_8.py example. This example builds on the previous code examples, so we will only show the new additional code:
def play(env, episodes, policy):
wins = 0
total_reward = 0
for episode in range(episodes):
term = False
state = env.reset()
while not term:
action = np.argmax(policy[state])
next_state, reward, term, info = env.step(action)
total_reward += reward
state = next_state
if term and reward == 1.0:
wins...