Introduction

Have you ever observed infants and how they learn to turn over, sit up, crawl, and even stand? Have you watched how baby birds learn to fly—the parents throw them out of the nest, they flutter for some time, and they slowly learn to fly. All of this learning involves a component of the following:

• Trial and error: The baby tries different ways and is unsuccessful many times before finally succeeding in doing it.
• Goal-oriented: All of the efforts are toward reaching a particular goal. The goal for the human baby can be to crawl, and for baby bird to fly.
• Interaction with the environment: The only feedback that they get is from the environment.

Note

This YouTube video is a beautiful video of a child learning to crawl and the stages in between https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3xWaOkXCSQ.

The human baby learning to crawl or baby bird learning to fly are both examples of RL in nature.

RL (in Artificial Intelligence) can be defined as a computational approach to goal-directed learning and...