Sudharsan Ravichandiran - Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python: Master reinforcement and deep reinforcement learning using OpenAI Gym and TensorFlow

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Sudharsan Ravichandiran is a data scientist, researcher, artificial intelligence enthusiast, and YouTuber (search for Sudharsan reinforcement learning). He completed his bachelors in information technology at Anna University. His area of research focuses on practical implementations of deep learning and reinforcement learning, which includes natural language processing and computer vision. He used to be a freelance web developer and designer and has designed award-winning websites. He is an open source contributor and loves answering questions on Stack Overflow.

Sujit Pal is a Technology Research Director at Elsevier Labs, an advanced technology group within the Reed-Elsevier Group of companies. His areas of interests include semantic search, natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning. At Elsevier, he has worked on several initiatives involving search quality measurement and improvement, image classification and duplicate detection, and annotation and ontology development for medical and scientific corpora. He has co-authored a book on deep learning with Antonio Gulli and writes about technology on his blog, Salmon Run.

Suriyadeepan Ramamoorthy is an AI researcher and engineer from Puducherry, India. His primary areas of research are natural language understanding and reasoning. He actively blogs about deep learning.

At SAAMA technologies, he applies advanced deep learning techniques for biomedical text analysis. He is a free software evangelist who is actively involved in community development activities at FSFTN. His other interests include community networks, data visualization and creative coding.

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Reinforcement learning is a self-evolving type of machine learning that takes us closer to achieving true artificial intelligence. This easy-to-follow guide explains everything from scratch using rich examples written in Python.

This book is intended for machine learning developers and deep learning enthusiasts who are interested in artificial intelligence and want to learn about reinforcement learning from scratch. Read this book and become a reinforcement learning expert by implementing practical examples at work or in projects. Having some knowledge of linear algebra, calculus, and the Python programming language will help you understand the flow of the book.

, Introduction to Reinforcement Learning, helps us understand what reinforcement learning is and how it works. We will learn about various elements of reinforcement learning, such as agents, environments, policies, and models, and we will see different types of environments, platforms, and libraries used for reinforcement learning. Later in the chapter, we will see some of the applications of reinforcement learning.

, Getting Started with OpenAI and TensorFlow, helps us set up our machine for various reinforcement learning tasks. We will learn how to set up our machine by installing Anaconda, Docker, OpenAI Gym, Universe, and TensorFlow. Then we will learn how to simulate agents in OpenAI Gym, and we will see how to build a video game bot. We will also learn the fundamentals of TensorFlow and see how to use TensorBoard for visualizations.