The play unfolds in an academic conference room, named "The Conference of Learning Innovators." Five experts in the field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) sit around a polished mahogany table. Their names are Professor Ada Sutton, a renowned expert in deep reinforcement learning; Dr. Leo Kael, specializing in policy gradient methods; Dr. Nova Lane, an expert in safe and robust RL algorithms; Dr. Max Vold, a specialist in value-based methods; and Dr. Iris Nash, known for her work in algorithmic optimization in RL.
Professor Ada Sutton, leading the discussion, begins:
Ada: Gentlemen, ladies, today we convene to illuminate the intricacies of the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. Dr. Kael, since you specialize in policy gradient methods, would you care to begin by establishing what problem PPO aims to solve within the RL domain?
Leo: Ada, an insightful starting point. At the heart of Reinforcement Learning, we have agents learning to make decisions—formulated in terms of policies—to ma