Deep learning

Deep learning has become one of the most popular and recognizable fields of machine learning and computer science. Thanks to an increase in both available data and computational resources, deep learning algorithms have successfully surpassed previous state-of-the-art results in countless tasks. For several domains, including image recognition and playing Go, deep learning has even exceeded the capabilities of mankind.

It is thus not surprising that many reinforcement learning algorithms have started to utilize deep learning to bolster performance. Many of the reinforcement learning algorithms from the beginning of this chapter rely on deep learning. This book, too, will revolve around deep learning algorithms used to tackle reinforcement learning problems.

The following sections will serve as a refresher on some of the most fundamental concepts of deep learning, including neural networks, backpropagation, and convolution. However, if are unfamiliar with these topics, we highly encourage you to seek other sources for a more in-depth introduction.