StarAi: Deep Reinforcement Learning Course

Posted by paulscon on Thursday June 27, 2019 @10:05AM
from the self-post dept.

Way back in 2017 when Deepmind released their PySC2 interface - we thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to create a competition to help accelerate the current state of the art in ML.

We thought that such a competition would need a big $ prize pool in order to attract talent to try help solve the "Starcraft problem". We tried to copy the model of the original Xprize and use insurance bonds to try finance the $ prize purse. This document, literally bounced around to insurance brokers all around the world- but we got no takers :). Lucky for us - as we all know by now Deepmind more or less solved the Starcraft problem this year.

One thing we realised, early circa 2018 is that there were no bringing RL down to earth courses out there to help people get involved in the envisioned Starcraft competition. So we went ahead and made it ourselves :)

I know that other great resources such as OpenAi's spinning up have come out since then, but we would like to present our work and open source it to the community. We hope this content inspires someone out there to do great things!

https://www.starai.io/

Re:StarAi: Deep Reinforcement Learning Course by MasterScrat on Thursday June 27, 2019 @10:23AM (#20294615)

Great! I would argue that no, there's still no great resource to learn RL "from scratch" - there's still a huge gap between Sutton&Barto and implementing DDPG. You have to figure out everything by reading existing implementations, various Medium posts (a lot of them containing errors and imprecisions), and research papers. I wouldn't consider Spinning Up as a beginner-friendly resource, it's too dense/math-heavy

The closest I have found so far is the Udacity course: https://eu.udacity.com/course/deep-reinforcement-learning-na... which costs $1000

So yeah, I'm excited to see what you've done! I'm working on a similar course, FYI.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:StarAi: Deep Reinforcement Learning Course by deepthought42 on Thursday June 27, 2019 @11:02AM (#20295012)

When I first started with RL I went through David Silver's course. I still think it's my favorite set of materials aside from "Artificial Intelligence: A modern approach by Russell and Norvig" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbWDNovNB5mqFBgq7i3MY...

Re:StarAi: Deep Reinforcement Learning Course by billconan on Thursday June 27, 2019 @12:02PM (#20295642)

I also think OpenAi's spinning up isn't beginner friendly.

Re:StarAi: Deep Reinforcement Learning Course by bigmit37 on Thursday June 27, 2019 @11:35AM (#20295342)

Thank you for this. Going to start this weekend.