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You're reading from  Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inJan 2020
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781838826994
Edition2nd Edition
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Author (1)
Maxim Lapan
Maxim Lapan
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Maxim Lapan

Maxim has been working as a software developer for more than 20 years and was involved in various areas: distributed scientific computing, distributed systems and big data processing. Since 2014 he is actively using machine and deep learning to solve practical industrial tasks, such as NLP problems, RL for web crawling and web pages analysis. He has been living in Germany with his family.
Read more about Maxim Lapan

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The Rubik's Cube and combinatorial optimization

I doubt it's possible to find a person who hasn't heard about the Rubik's Cube, so I'm not going to repeat the Wikipedia description (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Cube) of this puzzle, but rather focus on the connections it has to mathematics and computer science. If it's not explicitly stated, by "cube" I mean the 3×3 classic Rubik's Cube. There are lots of variations based on the original 3×3 puzzle, but they are still far less popular than the classic invention.

Despite being quite simple in terms of mechanics and the task at hand, the cube is quite a tricky object in terms of all the transformations we can make by possible rotations of its sides. It was calculated that in total, the cube has ~4.33 × 1019 distinct states reachable by rotating it. That's only the states that are reachable without disassembling the cube; by taking it apart and then assembling...

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Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On. - Second Edition
Published in: Jan 2020Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781838826994

Author (1)

author image
Maxim Lapan

Maxim has been working as a software developer for more than 20 years and was involved in various areas: distributed scientific computing, distributed systems and big data processing. Since 2014 he is actively using machine and deep learning to solve practical industrial tasks, such as NLP problems, RL for web crawling and web pages analysis. He has been living in Germany with his family.
Read more about Maxim Lapan