“Shall we play a game?”: A guide to AI Reinforcement Learning

It’s the early 90s, and as a child of that time, I’m wandering my sacred place, my temple — the local video store. Long before the world of streaming and internet-delivered media content, the video store was the launchpad for a child’s imagination. Rows and rows of pure magic encased in chemically treated plastic boxes that collectively gave rise to a smell that was unique to your local video store. The smell of action, adventure, and delight, at the low low price of $2 a night, or $3 a week (new releases $5 overnight!). It was within that hallowed place that I first came across the 1983 classic movie ‘WarGames’. Starring Matthew Broderick as a tenacious tech-savvy 80s teenager who hacks into equally 80s computer systems only to stumble upon the WOPR (a.k.a ‘Joshua’) a computer that could think, reason, talk and — most importantly — play games like a person. If you haven’t seen the film I’ll leave the rest for you to discover, but safe to say the fun begins when you realise that the WOPR not only plays games like chess and poker, but also global thermonuclear war. <a href="https://betterprogramming.pub/shall-we-play-a-game-a7c93963b442">Website</a>