My Journey to Reinforcement Learning -- Part 0: Introduction

When we google reinforcement learning, we can see images like above, over and over again. So rather than seeing an agent or environment, lets actually think about this as a process where a baby is learning how to walk. " The "problem statement" of the example is to walk, where the child is an agent trying to manipulate the environment (which is the surface on which it walks) by taking actions (viz walking) and he/she tries to go from one state (viz each step he/she takes) to another. The child gets a reward (let's say chocolate) when he/she accomplishes a sub module of the task (viz taking couple of steps) and will not receive any chocolate (a.k.a negative reward) when he/she is not able to walk. This is a simplified description of a reinforcement learning problem."