How are computers motivated in Q Learning?

Question

I get that it uses a number going up and down depending on the behavior, but why does the computer/AI try to make the number go up?

In: Technology

Answer 1

In some sense the number goes up because that’s all the AI knows to do.

When training the AI many different version are created with slight changes and the version which perform worse are removed (because we choose to remove them). This leads to the surviving version being better at optimising for the reward because if they weren’t they wouldn’t of survived.

So it’s not really motivated like people are, it just goes through steps depending on the input and the reward function is like a measure of how close it gets to the desired output.