Introduction to reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning is one of the main paradigms in machine learning alongside supervised and unsupervised methods. A major distinction is that supervised or unsupervised methods are passive, responding to changes, whereas RL is actively changing the environment and seeking out new data. In fact, from a machine learning perspective, reinforcement learning algorithms can be viewed as alternating between finding good data and doing supervised learning on that data.

Computer programs based on reinforcement learning have been breaking through barriers. In a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, in March 2016, DeepMind's AlphaGo defeated the professional Go board game player Lee Sedol. Previously, the game of Go was considered to be a hallmark of human creativity and intelligence, too complex to be learned by a machine.

It has been argued that it is edging us closer toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). For example...