-: Hello and welcome back to the course
on artificial intelligence.
In today's tutorial, we're going to discuss
the plan of attack for this amazing section
on the most powerful algorithm in artificial intelligence
which is A3C at the moment.
So let's have a look.
Today, we'll talk about the following things.
We'll start with the three A's of A3C,
so we'll talk about what the abbreviation stands for
and how we're going to deal with the three A's.
And also, we'll look at the actual article
or the actual research paper that gave birth to A3C,
the Google DeepMind research paper.
And we'll have a quick look at it
so that you're more comfortable navigating it
in your free time.
Plus, we will see exactly why the A3C is the cutting edge,
most advanced algorithm on the planet
for artificial intelligence at the moment
and why it's so important to have this in your arsenal.
Next, we're going to talk about the first A of A3C,
which is actor-critic.
Well, A3C actually stands for
Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm.
And so we're going through the A's not in order,
but we're going through them in an order
that makes sense for us,
that will help us in our intuitive understanding.
Then we'll talk about the asynchronous element
in the A3C algorithm,
and then we'll talk about the advantage
and that's the tutorial where we'll put everything together
and it will all start making sense.
So a quick word of caution
that as you're going through these,
you might notice that after the actor-critic
and even after the asynchronous tutorial,
you will still not exactly have the full picture
or full understanding of how this all ties in together.
And that's totally okay
because all these three elements they indeed work together
and they require each other to function.
So just power through it and get to the third tutorial.
And in the third tutorial, the advantage tutorial,
that's when it will all come together.
And if at that point
you still don't quite understand something,
then you can just revise that specific tutorial,
whether it's actor-critic or asynchronous
or the advantage tutorial, to put it all together.
But basically, just don't get thrown off
if after one of those two tutorials,
you still feel that you need some information,
that's because they all work together
to one functioning A3C algorithm.
That's in the advantage tutorial,
that all ties in together very nicely.
And finally, we'll talk about some additions
that you can add or some additional modules and elements
that you can add to the A3C algorithm.
The thing is that there's different versions
of the A3C algorithms, different modifications
and already through the first four tutorials in the section,
we will see some modifications.
And at the end, we will add an extra one,
the long short-term memory, LSTM.
Now, here we won't go into a lot of detail on LSTM.
That's a topic for another course,
but nevertheless, you will get a overview of what LSTM is
and how those structures
or how those layers and neural networks work
so that you have a better understanding
in preparation for the practical tutorials.
But very important also,
this will showcase how the A3C algorithm can be modified
to suit certain purposes.
So there we go. That's the plan for this section.
Definitely it's going to be an exciting algorithm to look at
because it's the top algorithm at the moment in the world
and we're going to be developing an intuitive understanding.
And then together after this, you're going to be coding it,
which is very, very exciting.
And I can't wait to see you on the first tutorial.
And until then, enjoy AI.