Chapter 19. Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most exciting fields of machine learning today, and also one of the oldest. It has been around since the 1950s, producing many interesting applications over the years,1 particularly in games (e.g., TD-Gammon, a backgammon-playing program) and in machine control, but seldom making the headline news. However, a revolution took place in 2013, when researchers from a British startup called DeepMind2 demonstrated a system that could learn to play just about any Atari game from scratch,3 eventually outperforming humans4 in most of them, using only raw pixels as inputs and without any prior knowledge of the rules of the games.5 This was the first of a series of amazing feats:
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In 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, a legendary professional player of the game of Go; and in 2017, it beat Ke Jie, the world champion. No program had ever come close to beating a master of this game, let alone the very best.
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In 2020, DeepMind released AlphaFold, which can predict the 3D shape of proteins with unprecedented accuracy. This is a game changer in biology, chemistry, and medicine. In fact, Demis Hassabis (founder and CEO) and John Jumper (director) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold.
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In 2022, DeepMind released AlphaCode, which can generate code at a competitive programming level.
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In 2023, DeepMind released GNoME which can predict new crystal structures, including hundreds of thousands ...
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