RL will disrupt OR

Operations research (OR) is in the initial stages of a revolution driven by reinforcement learning (RL). When I was at eHarmony years ago, we used classical OR techniques to drive the matchmaking process. Machine learning played a critical role, but was limited to specfiying parameters to the OR solver. In essence, machine learning was to used to estimate the value function, and the OR solver then produced a policy. OR has historically focused on highly tractable specializations of convex optimization.