Reinforcement Learning: from trial & error to deep Q-learning

My objective with this article is to demystify a few foundational Reinforcement Learning (RL) concepts with hands-on examples. We are going to apply RL to the infamous Glass Bridge challenge from the Netflix series Squid Game episode 7. Although no previous RL knowledge is required, solid Python coding skills and basic machine learning understanding are necessary to follow the content of this article. The code can be found here. In simple words, RL is a computational approach used to achieve a pre-defined goal, which can be winning a chess game, optimizing a medical treatment, or improving a financial trading strategy.