Reinforcement Learning and Its Implications for Enterprise Artificial Intelligence

Deep RL is where deep learning is used in conjunction with RL to simplify the reward function in cases where the search space is very large, or the environment is very complicated with multi-dimensional states, actions, and rewards. The use of deep learning with RL is also known as Q-learning in which a deep learning network is used as a function approximator (called the Q function), predicting the reward for an input, rather than trying to explore and store rewards and actions for every state. Also, in simulation environments, by simply feeding pixels of an environment through a neural network, it allows the reinforcement algorithm to better understand its environment. For the most part, RL is being used to teach AI systems how to play games, as games provide a safe and bounded environment for learning. For example, AlphaGo uses RL (in combination with other techniques) and similar techniques to have AI learn Atari games, or become champions at Poker.