Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By : Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani
Book Image

Python Reinforcement Learning Projects

By: Sean Saito, Yang Wenzhuo, Rajalingappaa Shanmugamani

Overview of this book

Reinforcement learning is one of the most exciting and rapidly growing fields in machine learning. This is due to the many novel algorithms developed and incredible results published in recent years. In this book, you will learn about the core concepts of RL including Q-learning, policy gradients, Monte Carlo processes, and several deep reinforcement learning algorithms. As you make your way through the book, you'll work on projects with datasets of various modalities including image, text, and video. You will gain experience in several domains, including gaming, image processing, and physical simulations. You'll explore technologies such as TensorFlow and OpenAI Gym to implement deep learning reinforcement learning algorithms that also predict stock prices, generate natural language, and even build other neural networks. By the end of this book, you will have hands-on experience with eight reinforcement learning projects, each addressing different topics and/or algorithms. We hope these practical exercises will provide you with better intuition and insight about the field of reinforcement learning and how to apply its algorithms to various problems in real life.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction to Atari games


Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. In 1976, Bushnell developed the Atari video computer system, or Atari VCS (later renamed Atari 2600). Atari VCS was a flexible console that was capable of playing the existing Atari games, which included a console, two joysticks, a pair of paddles, and the combat game cartridge. The following screenshot depicts an Atari console:

Atari 2600 has more than 500 games that were published by Atari, Sears, and some third parties. Some famous games are Breakout, Pac-Man, Pitfall!, Atlantis, Seaquest, and Space Invaders.

As a direct result of the North American video game crash of 1983, Atari, Inc. was closed and its properties were split in 1984. The home computing and game console divisions of Atari were sold to Jack Tramiel under the name Atari corporation in July 1984.

For readers who are interested in playing Atari games, here are several online...