Quantum Reinforcement Learning Applied to Board Games

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning paradigm where an agent learns how to optimize its behavior solely through its interaction with the environment. It has been extensively studied and successfully applied to complex problems of many different domains in the past decades, i.e., robotics, games, scheduling. However, the performance of these algorithms becomes limited as the complexity and dimension of the state-action space increases. Recent advances in quantum computing and quantum information have sparked interest in possible applications to machine learning. By taking advantage of quantum mechanics, it is possible to efficiently process immense quantities of information and improve computational speed. In this work, we combined quantum computing with reinforcement learning and studied its application to a board game to assess the benefits that it can introduce, namely its impact on the learning efficiency of an agent. From the results, we concluded that the proposed quantum exploration policy improved the convergence rate of the agent and promoted a more efficient exploration of the state space.