Meet the next big thing in the world of artificial intelligence

If you've ever trained a puppy before, you know just how valuable food rewards can be. After little Sparky realizes that the act of rolling over instantly earns him a mouthful of peanut butter, he starts performing the trick with increased enthusiasm and speed. (Good boy, Sparky!)

This type of behavioral psychology — getting something to act a certain way so that it maximizes its rewards — has inspired a new approach to artificial intelligence called reinforcement learning. Named one of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2017 by the MIT Technology Review, this revolutionary kind of machine learning allows computers to learn new things without human intervention through the mere act of experimenting. 

Writes Will Knight, the MIT Technology Review's senior editor for AI: "In addition to improving self-driving cars, the technology can get a robot to grasp objects it has never seen before, and it can figure out the optimal configuration for the equipment in a data center." In a nutshell, it's the closest humanity has gotten, so far, to true artificial intelligence.

With the widespread availability of reinforcement learning expected to arrive in about one to two years, per MIT, there's no better time to become familiar with the technology. The easiest (and most budget-friendly) way to do so would be through the Reinforcement Learning Bundle, a set of four online courses that cover core AI concepts like A/B testing, Bayesian machine learning in Python, generative adversarial networks, applications of deep learning and neural networks, an introduction to reinforcement learning, and so much more. 

For a limited time, you'll find this essential education on sale in the Mashable Shop for only $39 — 94% off the original price of $660.

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Credit: Mashable Staff

Save 94% on the Reinforcement Learning Bundle

 

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