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

This was a short but intense chapter in which we spent time looking at various third-party DRL frameworks. Fortunately, all of these frameworks are all still free and open source, and let's hope they stay that way. We started by looking at the many growing frameworks and some pros and cons. Then, we looked at what are currently the most popular or promising libraries. Starting with Google Dopamine, which showcases RainbowDQN, we looked at how to run a quick sample of Google Colab. After that, Keras-RL was next, and we introduced ourselves to the Keras framework as well as how to use the Keras-RL library. Moving on to RLLib, we looked at the powerful automation of the DRL framework that has many capabilities. Finally, we finished up this chapter with another entry from Google, TF-Agents, where we ran a complete DQN agent using TF-Agents on a Google Colab notebook.

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