1. Introduction to Reinforcement Learning

Overview

This chapter introduces the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, which is one of the most exciting fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence. You will learn how to describe the characteristics and advanced applications of RL to show what can be achieved within this framework. You will also learn to differentiate between RL and other learning approaches. You will learn the main concepts of this discipline both from a theoretical point of view and from a practical point of view using Python and other useful libraries.

By the end of the chapter, you will understand what RL is and know how to use the Gym toolkit and Baselines, two popular libraries in this field, to interact with an environment and implement a simple learning loop.