Hands-On Intelligent Agents with OpenAI Gym

Walks through the hands-on process of building intelligent agents from the basics and all the way up to solving complex problems including playing Atari games and driving a car autonomously in the CARLA simulator. Discusses various learning environments and how to transform real-world problems into learning environments and solve using the agents.

• Explore the OpenAI Gym toolkit and interface to use over 700 learning tasks
• Implement agents to solve simple to complex AI problems
• Study learning environments and discover how to create your own

Many real-world problems can be broken down into tasks that require a series of decisions to be made or actions to be taken. The ability to solve such tasks without a machine being programmed requires a machine to be artificially intelligent and capable of learning to adapt. This book is an easy-to-follow guide to implementing learning algorithms for machine software agents in order to solve discrete or continuous sequential decision making and control tasks.

Hands-On Intelligent Agents with OpenAI Gym takes you through the process of building intelligent agent algorithms using deep reinforcement learning starting from the implementation of the building blocks for configuring, training, logging, visualizing, testing, and monitoring the agent. You will walk through the process of building intelligent agents from scratch to perform a variety of tasks. In the closing chapters, the book provides an overview of the latest learning environments and learning algorithms, along with pointers to more resources that will help you take your deep reinforcement learning skills to the next level.

• Explore intelligent agents and learning environments
• Understand the basics of RL and deep RL
• Get started with OpenAI Gym and PyTorch for deep reinforcement learning
• Discover deep Q learning agents to solve discrete optimal control tasks
• Create custom learning environments for real-world problems
• Apply a deep actor-critic agent to drive a car autonomously in CARLA
• Use the latest learning environments and algorithms to upgrade your intelligent agent development skills

If you’re a student, game/machine learning developer, or AI enthusiast looking to get started with building intelligent agents and algorithms to solve a variety of problems with the OpenAI Gym interface, this book is for you. You will also find this book useful if you want to learn how to build deep reinforcement learning-based agents to solve problems in your domain of interest. Though the book covers all the basic concepts that you need to know, some working knowledge of Python programming language will help you get the most out of it.