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Reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a subset of machine learning where an agent learns to make decisions by interacting with an environment. The agent learns from the consequences of its actions, receiving rewards or penalties, and uses this feedback to improve its decision-making over time. RL is inspired by behavioral psychology, where learning is based on trial and error, with the goal of maximizing cumulative reward.

Key components of reinforcement learning include:

1. Agent
 The learner or decision-maker that interacts with the environment. The agent takes actions based on its policy (strategy) to maximize its cumulative reward.

2. Environment
 The external system with which the agent interacts. It responds to the agent's actions and provides feedback in the form of rewards or penalties.

3. State
 The current configuration or situation of the environment. The state is used by the agent to make decisions about which actions to take.

4. Action
 The set of possible choices or decisions that the agent can make at each state. The agent selects actions based on its policy.

5. Reward
 A scalar feedback signal from the environment indicating how good or bad the agent's action was. The agent's goal is to maximize the cumulative reward over time.

6. Policy
 The strategy or rule that the agent uses to select actions based on the current state. The policy can be deterministic or stochastic.

7. Value Function
 A function that estimates the expected cumulative reward that can be obtained from a given state or state-action pair. The value function is used by the agent to evaluate the quality of its actions and states.

8. Exploration vs. Exploitation
Balancing the exploration of new actions to discover potentially better strategies and the exploitation of known strategies to maximize immediate rewards.

Reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Q-learning, SARSA, and Deep Q-Networks (DQN), are used to train agents to learn optimal policies in various environments. RL has been successfully applied to a wide range of problems, including game playing, robotics, and natural language processing.

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