Summary
In this chapter, you became familiar with the cross-entropy method, which is simple but quite powerful, despite its limitations. We applied it to a CartPole environment (with huge success) and to FrozenLake (with much more modest success). In addition, we discussed the taxonomy of RL methods, which will be referenced many times during the rest of the book, as different approaches to RL problems have different properties, which influences their applicability.
This chapter ends the introductory part of the book. In the next part, we will switch to a more systematic study of RL methods and discuss the value-based family of methods. In upcoming chapters, we will explore more complex, but more powerful, tools of deep RL.