Summary
This was our refresher on RL fundamentals! We began this chapter by discussing what RL is, and why it is such a hot topic and the next frontier in AI. We talked about some of the many possible applications of RL and the success stories that made it to the news headlines over the past several years. We defined the fundamental concepts we will use throughout the book. Finally, we covered the hardware and software you need to run the algorithms we will introduce in the next sections. Everything so far was to refresh your mind about RL, motivate and set you up for what is upcoming next: Implementing advanced RL algorithms to solve challenging real-world problems. In the next chapter, we will dive right into it with multi-armed bandit problems, an important class of RL algorithms that has many applications in personalization and advertising.
