About

Tinker & Play is a collection of tutorials and experiments on reinforcement learning, with a focus on training AI agents to play games.

I was inspired to learn RL the first time I saw the documentary "AlphaGo" and because it is a subfield of AI that is so closely related to how humans learn.

The goal of this project is not to create something new, but rather an eager attempt to understand something more deeply, in which case it is reinforcement learning in games. I grew up playing Snake, Flappy Bird, and Fireboy & Watergirl, so I want to understand how these games work and how we can teach machines to play them.

I write these tutorials with 2 audience in mind: 1) my younger self who was so curious about RL but couldn't find a good resource that balances explanation and coding to help her understand the topic, and 2) anyone who has some background in CS (e.g., you already took an intro course to machine learning and you know how to code in Python) and wants to learn more about RL. I've learned a lot throughout the process of writing these tutorials and I hope you find them useful as well.

Sincerely,

Thu