It was. Around the time this came out, something like half of the new ML papers were about reinforcement learning. The problem is that it’s incredibly slow and inefficient compared to any learning where you have access to a gradient and can use that to choose more targeted weight updates.
But there are certain applications where it’s the only good way of doing it (for example in games, where you don’t have access to a gradient over the space of how good a certain move is given the current game state, and it’s relatively quick and and efficient to simulate the evolution of the game).
But there are certain applications where it’s the only good way of doing it (for example in games, where you don’t have access to a gradient over the space of how good a certain move is given the current game state, and it’s relatively quick and and efficient to simulate the evolution of the game).