Deep Reinforcement Learning in Action

Chapter 1. What is reinforcement learning?

This chapter covers

• A brief review of machine learning
• Introducing reinforcement learning as a subfield
• The basic framework of reinforcement learning

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

Marvin Minksy, 1970 ACM Turing Lecture

If you’re reading this book, you are probably familiar with how deep neural networks are used for things like image classification or prediction (and if not, just keep reading; we also have a crash course in deep learning in the appendix). Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a subfield of machine learning that utilizes deep learning models (i.e., neural networks) in reinforcement learning (RL) ...