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

Summary

In this chapter, we took a diversion and built our own DRL environments for training with our own code, or another framework, or using the ML-Agents framework from Unity. At first, we looked at the basics of installing the ML-Agents toolkit for the development of environments, training, and training with our own code. Then, we looked at how to build a basic Unity environment for training from a Gym interface like we have been doing throughout this whole book. After that, we learned how our RainbowDQN sample could be customized to train an agent. From there, we looked at how we can create a brand new environment from the basics. We finished this chapter by looking at managing rewards in environments and the set of tools ML-Agents uses to enhance environments with sparse rewards. There, we looked at several methods Unity has added to ML-Agents to assist with difficult environments...