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
Computers don’t want, or care about, anything until we give them a program that tells them what to want/care about. (I’m anthropomorphizing computers here, obviously, but you get the point.)
In machine learning, we give the computer a “value function” or a “reward function” that tells them how good a job they’re doing, and then we tell them that their goal in life is to maximize that function. Once we tell them that, they go after it with everything they have. That’s simply how programming works; if you write code that gets the machine to come up with some options, work out what the reward would be for each option and then choose the one with the highest reward, then assuming the computer’s working correctly, that’s what it will do.
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