1 rich Libsyn https://www.libsyn.com 90 600 The Bitter Lesson: The history of reinforcement learning I've been trying to understand how machine learning actually works. Not use it,&amp;nbsp;understand it, down to the ifs and loops. How does a program built out of plain conditionals get better on its own? So late one night I sent Don a paper. Three words in the title: reward is enough. The claim is that all of intelligence, the whole thing, comes down to a system maximizing a reward. Don thought that was far too reductive. I wanted to pull it apart and see if it held up. We backed up through the history to find out how far &quot;reward is enough&quot; really goes: B.F. Skinner training pigeons, a backgammon program that taught itself, the Go move no human would have played. It's a story about machine learning, and what that leaves for the rest of us who&amp;nbsp;still do it by hand. Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter &amp;nbsp; CoRecursive: Coding Stories http://corecursive.com <iframe title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/41633955/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/88AA3C/" height="90" width="600" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe> https://assets.libsyn.com/secure/item/41633955