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

Understanding the Bellman equation

Bellman worked on solving finite MDP with DP, and it was during these efforts he derived his famed equation. The beauty behind this equation—and more abstractly, the concept, in generalis that it describes a method of optimizing the value or quality of a state. In other words, it describes how we can determine the optimal value/quality for being in a given state given the action and choices of successive states. Before breaking down the equation itself, let's first reconsider the finite MDP in the next section.

Unraveling the finite MDP

Consider the finite MDP we developed in Chapter 1, Understanding Rewards Learning, that described your morning routine. Don't to...