Early on, when there’s much to learn, it makes sense to explore a lot. Once you know the territory, it’s best to concentrate on exploiting it. That’s what humans do over their lifetimes: children explore, and adults exploit (except for scientists, who are eternal children). Children’s play is a lot more serious than it looks; if evolution made a creature that is helpless and a heavy burden on its parents for the first several years of its life, that extravagant cost must be for the sake of an even bigger benefit. In effect, reinforcement learning is a kind of speeded-up evolution—trying,
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