You may have read sci-fi novels from the 50s and 60s; they are full of visions of what life in the 21st century would look like. These stories imagined a world of people with personal jet packs, underwater cities, intergalactic travel, flying cars, and truly intelligent robots capable of independent thought. The 21st century has arrived now; sadly, we are not going to get those flying cars, but thanks to deep learning, we may get the robot.
In Chapter 9, Deep Reinforcement Learning for Games, and Chapter 10, Deep Learning in autonomous Vehicles, we'll talk about Reinforcement learning (RL) – a way to make machines interact with an environment, similar to the way we people interact with the physical world. As with many of the algorithms discussed so far, RL is not a new concept. But, recently, the field has seen something of a resurgence...