You're reading from Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On Apply modern RL methods to practical problems of chatbots, robotics, discrete optimization, web automation, and more

Product type Paperback

Published in Jan 2020

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781838826994

Length 826 pages

Edition 2nd Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

Deep Reinforcement Learning

Concepts

Chatbots

Author (1):

Maxim Lapan

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Table of Contents (28) Chapters

Preface

1. What Is Reinforcement Learning?

2. OpenAI Gym FREE CHAPTER

3. Deep Learning with PyTorch

4. The Cross-Entropy Method

5. Tabular Learning and the Bellman Equation

6. Deep Q-Networks

7. Higher-Level RL Libraries

8. DQN Extensions

9. Ways to Speed up RL

10. Stocks Trading Using RL

11. Policy Gradients – an Alternative

12. The Actor-Critic Method

13. Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic

14. Training Chatbots with RL

15. The TextWorld Environment

16. Web Navigation

17. Continuous Action Space

18. RL in Robotics

19. Trust Regions – PPO, TRPO, ACKTR, and SAC

20. Black-Box Optimization in RL

21. Advanced Exploration

22. Beyond Model-Free – Imagination

23. AlphaGo Zero

24. RL in Discrete Optimization

25. Multi-agent RL

26. Other Books You May Enjoy

27. Index

The environment

At the time of writing, the TextWorld environment supports only Linux and macOS platforms and internally relies on the Inform 7 system (http://inform7.com). There are two webpages for the project: one is the Microsoft Research webpage: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/textworld/, which contains general information about the environment, and the another is on GitHub (https://github.com/microsoft/TextWorld) and describes installation and usage. Let's start with installation.

Installation

The installation instructions suggest that you can install the package by just typing pip install textworld in your Python virtual environment, but at the time of writing, this step is broken by a changed URL for the Inform 7 engine. Hopefully, this will be fixed on the next TextWorld release, but if you experience any issues, you can set up a version that I've tested for this example by running pip install git+https://github.com/microsoft/TextWorld@f1ac489fefeb6a48684ed1f89422b84b7b4a6e4b...