HackerTube

RL Course by David Silver - Lecture 1: Introduction to Reinforcement Learning

Google DeepMind9 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2017–2026
YouTube
course · intro · evergreen · 2017–2026 on HN

The first lecture of David Silver's reinforcement learning course, introducing the field and its basic concepts. The course follows the Sutton and Barto textbook.

Frequently recommended as an excellent, clear introductory RL course from the lead of AlphaGo, pairing well with Sutton and Barto.

11 comments from Hacker News

@briandw2025-06 · in “Q-learning is not yet scalable”

This papers assumes that you know quite a bit about RL already. If you really want to dig into RL, this intro course from David Silver (Deep Mind) is excellent: ▶ this video

Strongly recommends View on HN
@colmvp2020-04 · in “ACM Prize in Computing Awarded to AlphaGo Developer”

I almost knew exactly who it was going to be when they mentioned AlphaGo Developer. For those who aren't that well versed in RL, I recommend watching his lectures at UCL ( ▶ this video ). Really clear explanations that went hand in hand when I was reading Sutton and Barto's introductory book.

Strongly recommends View on HN
@confuseshrink2020-07 · in “Powerful AI Can Now Be Trained on a Single Computer”

I would start with David Silvers (DeepMind) youtube series to get an idea of what's possible or not. Running an already trained reinforcement learning agent is relatively cheap (unless your model is massive). I suspect the reason people aren't using it yet is because it's a) really difficult to get right in training, even basic convergence is not guaranteed without careful tuning b) really difficult to guarantee reasonable behavior outside of the scenarios you're able to reach in QA. edit: Link to lecture series ▶ this video

Recommends View on HN
@alkhatib2019-02 · in “Dopamine framework: Fast prototyping of reinforcement learning algorithms (2018)”

I came across this a few days ago: For Reinforcement Learning specifically, the standard text is Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction[1]. Dave's UCL Course on RL[2] is great too (playlist of all lectures)[3]. Source: Julian Schrittwieser works on Deepmind at Google link [1] link [2] link [3] ▶ this video

Recommends View on HN
@colmvp2019-02 · in “Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction (2018) [pdf]”

I also recommend interested people to watch David Silver's RL lectures at UCL on YouTube. He covers material from the book. ▶ this video

Recommends View on HN