Agent

In the reinforcement learning world, a machine is run or instructed by a (software) agent. The agent is the part of the machine that possesses intelligence and makes decisions on what to do next. You will come across the term "agent" several times as we dive deeper into reinforcement learning. Reinforcement learning is based on the reward hypothesis, which states that any goal can be described by the maximization of the expected cumulative reward. So, what is this reward exactly? That's what we'll discuss next.