Reinforcement Learning Algorithms with Python

EAs

As you may have guessed, EAs differ in many aspects from RL algorithms and are principally inspired by biological evolution. EAs include many similar methods such as, genetic algorithms, evolution strategies, and genetic programming, which vary in their implementation details and in the nature of their representation. However, they are all mainly based on four basic mechanisms – reproductions, mutation, crossover, and selection – that are cycled in a guess-and-check process. We'll see what this means as we progress through this chapter.

Evolutionary algorithms are defined as black-box algorithms. These are algorithms that optimize a function, , with respect to without making any assumption about . Hence, can be anything you want. We ...