Coursework 2 – Tic-Tac-To: Markov Decision
Processes & Reinforcement Learning (worth 25%
of your final mark)
Deadline: Thursday, 28th November 2024
How to Submit: To be submitted to GitLab (via git commit & push) – Commits are
timestamped: all commits after the deadline will be considered late.
Introduction
Coursework 2 is an individual assignment, where you will each implement Value
Iteration, Policy Iteration that plan/learn to play 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe game. You will test
your agents against other rule-based agents that are provided. You can also play against
all the agents including your own agents to test them.
The Starter Code for this project is commented extensively to guide you, and includes
Javadoc under src/main/javadoc/ folder in the main project folder - you should read
these carefully to learn to use the classes. This is comprised of the files below.
You should get the Starter Code from GitLab: Follow the step by step instructions in
the document I have put together for you:
Open Canvas->F29AI -> Modules -> GitLab (and Git) Learning Materials (Videos and
Crib Sheets) -> Introduction to Eclipse, Git & GitLab.
If you are unfamiliar with git and/or GitLab I strongly suggest watching Rob
Stewart’s instructive videos on Canvas under the same module
Files you will edit & submit
ValueIterationAgent.java A Value Iteration agent for solving the Tic-Tac-Toe
game with an assumed MDP model.
PolicyIterationAgent.java A Policy Iteration agent for solving the Tic-Tac-Toe
game with an assumed MDP model.
QLearningAgent.java A q-learner, Reinforcement Learning agent for the
Tic-Tac-Toe game.
Files you should read & use but shouldn’t need to edit
Game.java The 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe game implementation.
TTTMDP.java Defines the Tic-Tac-Toe MDP model
TTTEnvironment.java Defines the Tic-Tac-Toe Reinforcement Learning
environment
Agent.java Abstract class defining a general agent, which other
agents subclass.
HumanAgent.java Defines a human agent that uses the command line to
ask the user for the next move
RandomAgent.java Tic-Tac-Toe agent that plays randomly according to a
RandomPolicy
Move.java Defines a Tic-Tac-Toe game move
Outcome.java A transition outcome tuple (s,a,r,s’)
Policy.java An abstract class defining a policy – you should subclass
this to define your own policies
TransitionProb.java A tuple containing an Outcome object and a probability
of the Outcome occurring.
RandomPolicy.java A subclass of policy – it’s a random policy used by a
RandomAgent instance.
What to submit: You will fill in portions of ValueIterationAgent.java,
PolicyIterationAgent.java and QLearningAgent.java during the assignment.
Commit & push your changes to your fork of the repository. Do this frequently so
nothing is lost. There will soon be automatic unit tests written for this project, which
means that you’ll be able to see whether your code passes the tests, both locally, and on
GitLab. I will send an announcement once I’ve uploaded the tests.
PLEASE DO NOT UPLOAD YOUR SOLUTIONS TO A PUBLIC REPOSITORY. We have
spent a great deal of time writing the code & designing the coursework and want to be
able to reuse this coursework in the coming years.
Evaluation: Your code will be tested on GitLab for correctness using Maven & the Java
Unit Test framework. Please do not change the names of any provided functions or
classes within the code, or you will wreck the tests.
Mistakes in the code: If you are sure you have found a mistake in the current code let
me or the lab helpers know and we will fix it.
Plagiarism: While you are welcome to discuss the problem together in the labs, we will
be checking your code against other submissions in the class for logical redundancy. If
you copy someone else's code and submit it with minor changes, we will know. These
cheat detectors are quite hard to fool, so please don't try. We trust you all to submit
your own work only; please don't let us down. If you do, we will pursue the strongest
consequences with the school that are available to us.
Getting Help: You are not alone! If you find yourself stuck on something, ask in the
labs. You can ask for help on GitLab too – but it means you will need to commit & push
your code first: don’t worry, you won’t be judged until the deadline. It’s good practice to
commit & push your code frequently to the repository, even if it doesn’t work.
We want this coursework to be intellectually rewarding and fun.
MDPs & Reinforcement Learning
To get started, run Game.java without any parameters and you’ll be able to play the
RandomAgent using the command line. From within the top level, main project folder:
java –cp target/classes/ ticTacToe.Game
You should be able to win or draw easily against this agent. Not a very good agent!
You can control many aspects of the Game, but mainly which agents will play each
other. A full list of options is available by running:
java –cp target/classes/ ticTacToe.Game -h
Use the –x & -o options to specify the agents that you want to play the game. Your own
agents, namely, Value Iteration, Policy Iteration, and Q-Learning agents are denoted as
vi, pi & ql respectively, and can only play X in the game. This ignores the problem of
dealing with isomorphic state spaces (mapping x’s to o’s and o’s to x’s in this case). For
example if you want two RandomAgents to play out the game, you do it like this:
java target/classes/ ticTacToe.Game –x random –o
random
Look at the console output that accompanies playing the game. You will be told about
the rewards that the ‘X’ agent receives. The `O’ agent is always assumed to be part of
the environment.
Question 1 (6 points) Write a value iteration agent in ValueIterationAgent.java
which has been partially specified for you. Here you need to implement the iterate() &
extractPolicy() methods. The former should perform value iteration for a number of
steps (k steps – this is one of the fields of the class) and the latter should extract the
policy from the computed values.
Your value iteration agent is an offline planner, not a reinforcement agent, and so the
relevant training option is the number of iterations of value iteration it should run in its
initial planning phase – you can change this in ValueIterationAgent.java.
ValueIterationAgent constructs a TTTMDP object on construction – you do not need to
change this class, but use it in your value iteration implementation to generate the set of
next game states (the sPrimes), their associated probabilities & rewards when executing
a move from a particular game state (a Game object). You can do this using the provided
generateTransitions method in the TTTMDP class, which effectively gives you a
probability distribution over Outcomes.
Value iteration computes k-step estimates of the optimal values, Vk. You will see that the
the Value Function, Vk is stored as a java HashMap, from Game objects (states) to a
double value. The corresponding hashCode function for Game objects has been
implemented so you can safely use whole Game objects as keys in the HashMap.
Note: You may assume that 50 iterations is enough for convergence in this question.
Note: Unlike the MDPs in the class, in the CW2 implementation, your agent receives a
reward when entering a state – the reward simply depends on the target state, rather
than on source state, action, and target state. This means that there is no imagined
terminal state outside the game like in the lectures. Don’t worry – all the methods you
have learned are compatible with this setting.
Note: The O agent is modelled as part of the environment, so that once your agent
(X) takes an action, any next observed state would include O’s move. The agents need
NOT care about the intermediate game/state where only they have played and not yet
the opponent.
The following command loads your ValueIterationAgent, which will compute a policy
and executes it 10 times against the other agent which you specify, e.g. random, or
aggressive. The –s option specifies which agent goes first (X or O). By default, the X
agent goes first.
java target/classes/ ticTacToe.Game -x vi -o
random –s x
Question 2 (1 point): Test your Value Iteration Agent against each of the provided
agents 50 times and report on the results – how many games they won, lost & drew
against each of the other rule based agents. The rule based agents are: random,
aggressive, defensive.
This should take the form of a very short .pdf report named: vi-agent-report.pdf.
Commit this together with your code, and push to your fork.
Question 3 (6 point) Write a Policy Iteration agent in PolicyIterationAgent.java by
implementing the initRandomPolicy(), evaluatePolicy(), improvePolicy() &
train() methods. The evaluatePolicy() method should evaluate the current policy
(see your lecture notes), specified in the curPolicy field (which your
initRandomPolicy() initialized). The current values for the current policy should be
stored in the provided policyValues map. The improvePolicy() method performs the
Policy improvement step, and updates curPolicy.
Question 4 (1 point): As in Question 2, this time test your Policy Iteration Agent
against each of the provided agents 50 times and report on the results – how many
games they won, lost & drew. The other agents are: random, aggressive, defensive.
This should take the form of a very short .pdf report named: pi-agent-report.pdf.
Commit this together with your code, and push to your fork.
Questions 5 & 6 are on Reinforcement Learning:
Question 5 (5 points): Write a Q-Learning agent in QLearningAgent.java by
implementing the train() & extractPolicy()methods. Your agent should follow an
e-greedy policy during training (and only during training – during testing it should follow
the extracted policy). Your agent will need to train for many episodes before the qvalues converge. Although default values have been set/given in the code, you are
strongly encouraged to play round with the hyperparameters of q-learning: the learning
rate (a), number of episodes to train, as well as the epsilon in the e-greedy policy
followed during training.
Question 6 (1 point): Like the previous questions, test your Q-Learning Agent against
each of the provided agents 50 times and report on the results - how many games they
won, lost & drew. The other agents are: random, aggressive, defensive.
This should take the form of a very short .pdf report named: ql-agent-report.pdf.
Commit this together with your code, and push to your fork.
Javadoc: There is extensive comments in the code, Javadoc (under the folder doc/ in
the project folder) and inline. You should read these carefully to understand what is
going on, and what methods to call/use. They might also contain hints in the right
direction.
Value of Terminal States: you need to be careful about the values of terminal states -
terminal states are states where X has won, states where O has won, and states where
the game is a draw. The value of these game states - V(g) - should under all
circumstances and in all iterations be set to 0. Here’s why: to find the optimal value
of a state you will be looping over all possible actions from that state. For terminal states
this is empty, and might, depending on your implementation of finding the
maximum, lead to a result where you would be setting the value of the terminal state to
a very low negative value (e.g. Double.MIN_VALUE). To avoid this, for every game
state g that you are considering and calculating its optimal value, CHECK IF IT
IS A TERMINAL STATE (using g.isTerminal()); if it is, set its value to 0, and
move to the next game state (you can use the ‘continue;’ statement inside your
loop). Note that your agent would have already received its reward when
transitioning INTO that state, not out of it.
Testing your agent: If everything is working well, and you have the right parameters
(e.g. reward function) your agents should never lose.
You can play around with the reward values in the TTTMDP class – especially try
increasing or decreasing the negative losing reward. Increasing this negative reward (to
more negative numbers) would encourage your agent to prefer defensive moves to
attacking moves. This will change their behavior (both for Policy & Value iteration) and
should encourage your agent to never lose the game. Machine Learning isn't like
Mathematics with complete certainty - you almost always have to experiment to get the
parameters of your model right!

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