A Beginner's Guide to Deep Reinforcement Learning (for Java and Scala) - Deeplearning4j: Open-source, Distributed Deep Learning for the JVM

While neural networks are responsible for recent breakthroughs in problems like computer vision, machine translation and time series prediction – they can also combine with reinforcement learning algorithms to create something astounding like AlphaGo. Reinforcement learning refers to goal-oriented algorithms, which learn how to attain a complex objective (goal) or maximize along a particular dimension over many steps; for example, maximize the points won in a game over many moves. They can start from a blank slate, and under the right conditions they achieve superhuman performance. Like a child incentivized by spankings and candy, these algorithms are penalized when they make the wrong decisions and rewarded when they make the right ones – this is reinforcement. Reinforcement algorithms that incorporate deep learning can beat world champions at the game of Go as well as human experts playing numerous Atari video games.