Materials:

• Lecture slides

• Russian:

  • Intro to RL - video
  • Blackbox optiization - video
  • Seminar - video only covering crossentropy method

• English:

  • [main] Video-intro by David Silver (english) - video
  • [main] Lecture by J Schulman with crossentropy method explained (english) - url
  • Optional lecture by David Silver (english) - video

More materials:

• [recommended] - awesome openai post about evolution strategies - blog post, article
• Deep learning course (if you want to learn in parallel) - https://github.com/yandexdataschool/HSE_deeplearning
• Video on genetic algorithms (english) - video
• Another guide to genetic algorithm (english) - video
• About Differential evolution (english) - pdf
• Video on Ant Colony Algorithm (english) - video
• Longer video on Ant Colony Algorithm (english) - video

Homework description

• Open gym_interface.ipynb and follow instructions from there
  • If you haven't installed everything yet, try
• After you're done there, proceed to crossentropy_method.ipynb
• You can find homework and bonus assignment descriptions at the end of that notebook.
• Note: so far it's enough to say pip install gym on top of any data-science-stuffed python, but we'd appreciate if you gradually switch to full installation.