Reinforcement Learning - Part 1

I'm going to begin a multipart series of posts on Reinforcement Learning (RL) that roughly follow an old 1996 textbook "Reinforcement Learning An Introduction" by Sutton and Barto. From my research, this text still seems to be the most thorough introduction to RL I could find. The Barto & Sutton text is itself a great read and is fairly approachable even for beginners, but I still think it's worth breaking down even further. It still amazes me how most of machine learning theory was established decades ago yet we've seen a huge explosion of interest and use in just the past several years largely due to dramatic improvements in computational power (i.e.