Numerical Computing with Python

The suitability of Monte Carlo prediction on grid-world problems

The following diagram has been plotted for illustration purposes. However, practically, Monte Carlo methods cannot be easily used for solving grid-world type problems, due to the fact that termination is not guaranteed for all the policies. If a policy was ever found that caused the agent to stay in the same state, then the next episode would never end. Step-by-step learning methods like (State-Action-Reward-State-Action (SARSA), which we will be covering in a later part of this chapter in TD Learning Control) do not have this problem because they quickly learn during the episode that such policies are poor, and switch to something else.