Hands-On Reinforcement Learning with Python

The three As

Before diving in, what does A3C mean? What do the three As signify?

In A3C, the first A, Asynchronous, implies how it works. Instead of having a single agent that tries to learn the optimal policy such as in DQN, here, we have multiple agents that interact with the environment. Since we have multiple agents interacting to the environment at the same time, we provide copies of the environment to every agent so that each agent can interact with its own copy of the environment. So, all these multiple agents are called worker agents and we have a separate agent called global network that all the agents report to. The global network aggregates the learning.

The second A is Advantage; we have seen what an advantage function is while ...