Kenny Bania, perhaps the most annoying character to appear on the show, offers Jerry a free Armani suit. The only thing Jerry needs to do in return: treat Bania to a meal at Mendy's.

Through a hilarious set of ambiguous meals, Jerry has to provide a second dinner, and they're faced with a choice of where to eat.

This scenario mirrors the exploration/exploitation tradeoff in reinforcement learning.

Reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning where agents learn to make decisions by either:

🔍 Exploration: Trying new actions to discover their outcomes

🎁 Exploitation: Sticking to known actions that yield the best rewards

Bania's predicament: Explore a new restaurant (risking disappointment but possibly finding a new gem) or exploit the known goodness of Mendy's.

Just like Jerry and Bania, AI agents constantly juggle between these tradeoffs. Some places where reinforcement learning is common are

◾ Marketing and advertising

◾ Self-driving cars and robotics

◾ Natural-language processing (Like ChatGPT using reinforcement learning with human feedback)

So the next time you're torn between your old favorite and the newcomer, know that even cutting edge algorithms grapple with these choices regularly.

Reinforcement learning is gold, Jerry! Gold!