Reinforcement Learning and Physics

Abstract

Machine learning techniques provide a remarkable tool for advancing scientific research, and this area has significantly grown in the past few years. In particular, reinforcement learning, an approach that maximizes a (long-term) reward by means of the actions taken by an agent in a given environment, can allow one for optimizing scientific discovery in a variety of fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology. Morover, physical systems, in particular quantum systems, may allow one for more efficient reinforcement learning protocols. In this review, we describe recent results in the field of reinforcement learning and physics. We include standard reinforcement learning techniques in the computer science community for enhancing physics research, as well as the more recent and emerging area of quantum reinforcement learning, inside quantum machine learning, for improving reinforcement learning computations.