Why AI That Teaches Itself to Achieve a Goal Is the Next Big Thing

What’s the difference between the creative power of game-playing AIs and the predictive AIs most companies seem to use? How they learn. The AIs that thrive at games like Go, creating never before seen strategies, use an approach called reinforcement learning — a mature machine learning technology that’s good at optimizing tasks in which an agent takes a series of actions over time, where each action is informed by the outcome of the previous ones, and where you can’t find a “right” answer the way you can with a prediction. It’s a powerful technology, but most companies don’t know how or when to apply it. The authors argue that reinforcement learning algorithms are good at automating and optimizing in situations dynamic situations with nuances that would be too hard to describe with formulas and rules.