What Are Major Reinforcement Learning Achievements & Papers From 2018?

At a 2017 O'Reilly AI conference, Andrew Ng ranked reinforcement learning dead last in terms of its utility for business applications. Compared to other machine learning methods like supervised learning, transfer learning, and even unsupervised learning, deep reinforcement learning (RL) is incredibly data hungry, often unstable, and rarely the best option in terms of performance. RL has historically been successfully applied only in arenas where mountains of simulated data can be generated on demand, such as games and robotics. Despite RL's limitations in solving business use cases, some AI experts believe this approach is the most viable strategy for achieving human or superhuman Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The recent victory of DeepMind's AlphaStar over top-ranked professional StarCraft players suggests we might be on the cusp of applying deep RL to real world problems with real-time demands, extraordinary complexity, and incomplete information.