[HN Gopher] Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2018)
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       Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2018)
        
       Author : ibobev
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2024-10-22 09:58 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (incompleteideas.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (incompleteideas.net)
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Related. Others?
       | 
       |  _Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2018) [pdf]_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19191746 - Feb 2019 (23
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, Second Edition_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18547998 - Nov 2018 (6
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _New Draft of "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, Second
       | Edition"_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568414 - Sept
       | 2016 (33 comments)
       | 
       |  _Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1083662 - Jan 2010 (4
       | comments)
        
       | whatever1 wrote:
       | Do we have any real world applications where the policy satisfies
       | strictly some constraints (think physics: conservation of mass
       | etc)? There is research in the field but not sure if anything is
       | in production.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | This is what I'd like to know as well.
        
       | cg30e wrote:
       | What are the math prerequisites for this book? What other
       | reinforcement learning books or courses are recommended for
       | beginners?
        
         | kasmura wrote:
         | This is THE book. It is suitable for beginners with basic math
         | background equivalent to CS undergrad I'd say
        
         | textlapse wrote:
         | Basic probability/stats and some basic fundamentals around
         | dynamic programming/recursion would be very helpful.
         | 
         | The big problem I found with this field is that the core ideas
         | are very subtly built on top of each other. Without a proper
         | teacher or an environment to study, self-study is much much
         | harder.
         | 
         | (Past chapter 5, it should be a breeze as the foundation would
         | have been strongly set)
        
       | kleiba wrote:
       | Interesting to read the last section of the last chapter (17.6
       | Reinforcement Learning and the Future of Artificial Intelligence)
       | given that the book is from 2020 and ChatGPT (in which RL plays a
       | key role) was published in 2022.
        
       | byyoung3 wrote:
       | i pretty much have read this book. pretty boring tbh but still
       | good. i would recommend doing hands on implementations with the
       | cartpole environment
        
       | gozzoo wrote:
       | This book seems to be very theoretical. Can someone recoment more
       | practical books with code samples using some modern ML framework,
       | probably something like _Hands-On Machine Learning_ by Geron
       | Aurelien
        
         | Jagerbizzle wrote:
         | https://course.fast.ai/
         | 
         | "You'll see that fast.ai's way of teaching is very different to
         | what you might be used to, if you did a technical degree at
         | university. Nearly all technical subjects at university are
         | taught "bottom up": start with basic foundations, and gradually
         | work up to complete useful solutions to real world problems.
         | But we go "top down": start with complete useful solutions to
         | real world problems, and gradually work down to the basic
         | foundations. Education experts recommend this approach for more
         | effective learning."
        
         | pkoperek wrote:
         | To be honest I think this may be actually an advantage: it
         | explains concepts which otherwise are just weird parameters in
         | code. Since it is pretty lengthy I would actually recommend to
         | read the chapters relevant to a specific method you are
         | interested in (maybe going a backwards to build the right
         | context).
         | 
         | If you I'd combine it with e.g.
         | https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/ or doing some toy
         | projects with https://stable-
         | baselines3.readthedocs.io/en/master/ it would probably render
         | the most value.
        
         | cg30e wrote:
         | "Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning" by Miguel Morales and
         | "Deep Reinforcement Learning in Action" by Alexander Zai and
         | Brandon Brown both look promising, though the code might be
         | outdated. Looks like they use the OpenAI Gym environment, which
         | has since been forked and maintained as Gymnasium.
        
       | kengoa wrote:
       | There's lecture notes on this book available from David Silver at
       | UCL: https://www.davidsilver.uk/teaching/
        
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