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

Introducing TDL

TDL was introduced by the father of RL himself, Dr. Richard Sutton, in 1988. Sutton had developed the method as an improvement to MC/DP but, as we will see, the method itself led to the development of Q-learning by Chris Watkins in 1989. The method itself is model-free and does not require episode completion before an agent learns. This makes this method very powerful for exploring unknown environments in real time, as we will see.

Before we get into discovering the updated mathematics to this approach, it may be helpful to look at the backup diagrams of all of the methods covered so far in the next section.

Bootstrapping and backup diagrams

TDL can learn during an episode by approximating the updated value...