Chapter 14. Building Virtual Worlds in Minecraft

In the two previous  chapters, we discussed the deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm for playing Atari games and the Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) algorithm for continuous control tasks. We saw the big success of these algorithms in solving complex problems when compared to traditional reinforcement learning algorithms without the use of deep neural networks to approximate the value function or the policy function. Their main disadvantage, especially for DQN, is that the training step converges too slowly, for example, training an agent to play Atari games takes about one week. For more complex games, even one week's training is insufficient.

This chapter will introduce a more complicated example, Minecraft, which is a popular online video game created by Swedish game developer Markus Persson and later developed by Mojang. You will learn how to launch a Minecraft environment using OpenAI Gym and play different missions. In order to build...