Reinforcement Learning: An Alternative Approach to Machine Intelligence

There are many unsolved problems that computers could solve if the appropriate software existed. Flight control systems for new, nonlinear aircraft, automated manufacturing systems, and sophisticated avionics systems all involve difficult, nonlinear control problems. Many of these problems currently are unsolvable, not because current computers are too slow or have too little memory, but simply because it is too difficult to calculate what the program should do. If a computer could learn to solve the problems through trial and error, that would be of great practical value. Attempts to solve this problem are generally known as artificial intelligence or machine intelligence.