Practical applications of reinforcement learning in industry

The flurry of headlines surrounding AlphaGo Zero (the most recent version of DeepMind's AI system for playing Go) means interest in reinforcement learning (RL) is bound to increase. Next to deep learning, RL is among the most followed topics in AI. For most companies, RL is something to investigate and evaluate but few organizations have identified use cases where RL may play a role. As we enter 2018, I want to briefly describe areas where RL has been applied. RL is confusingly used to refer to a set of problems and a set of techniques, so let's first settle on what RL will mean for the rest of this post.