The RL Spiral, Part 3: The Curse Bellman Couldn’t Break

RL can master any game in days. A toddler still learns faster. The reason is seventy years old, and nobody has fixed it.

This is the third article in The RL Spiral, an eight-part series on reinforcement learning. The previous article, The Equation That Explains Your Brain, showed that the brain and RL algorithms run the same learning equation. This one asks why the brain learns so much faster.