Hands-On Reinforcement Learning for Games

The history of RL

An Introduction to RL, by Sutton and Barto (1998), discusses the origins of modern RL being derived from two main threads with a later joining thread. The two main threads are trial and error-based learning and dynamic programming, with the third thread arriving later in the form of temporal difference learning. The primary thread founded by Sutton, trial and error, is based on animal psychology. As for the other methods, we will look at each in far more detail in their respective chapters. A diagram showing how these three threads converged to form modern RL is shown here:

The history of modern RL

Dr. Richard S. Sutton, ...