AI Terminologies 101: Understanding the Basics of Reinforcement Learning

Explore the potential of Reinforcement Learning in applications like game playing, robotics, and more.

Wednesday April 19, 2023 , 2 min Read

Reinforcement Learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that involves learning through trial-and-error. In Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to interact with an environment and maximise a reward signal by taking actions that lead to positive outcomes.

Reinforcement Learning has been used to achieve impressive results in a wide range of applications, from game playing to robotics. One of the most famous examples is AlphaGo, a Reinforcement Learning system that was able to defeat the world champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go.

Reinforcement Learning is based on the idea of an agent interacting with an environment. The agent observes the current state of the environment and takes an action, which results in a new state and a reward signal. The agent then uses this information to adjust its behaviour and make better decisions in the future.

One of the key advantages of Reinforcement Learning is its ability to learn from experience. Rather than relying on pre-programmed rules, Reinforcement Learning enables the agent to learn from its own actions and feedback from the environment. This makes Reinforcement Learning well-suited for tasks where the optimal strategy is not well-defined or where the environment is complex and unpredictable.

However, Reinforcement Learning can also be computationally expensive and require large amounts of data and processing power. There's also a risk of overfitting, where the agent becomes too specialised to the specific environment it was trained in and can't generalise to new environments.

Despite these challenges, Reinforcement Learning is an important tool in the AI toolkit and has enabled many of the recent breakthroughs in AI. As AI continues to evolve, we can expect to see even more sophisticated Reinforcement Learning models and applications in the future.

In future articles, we'll dive deeper into some of the other AI terminologies, like Computer Vision, Data Mining, and Decision Trees. We'll explain what they are, how they work, and why they're important. By the end of this series, you'll have a solid understanding of the key concepts and ideas behind AI, and you'll be well-equipped to explore this exciting field further.