Is Epicurus the father of Reinforcement Learning?
This work provides a novel historical perspective for AI researchers, though it is incremental as it primarily reinterprets existing philosophical ideas.
The paper tackles the misconception of Epicurean philosophy by linking it to reinforcement learning, showing that an objective function derived from Epicurus's letters is equivalent to the RL objective without discounting and aligns with the Bellman equation.
The Epicurean Philosophy is commonly thought as simplistic and hedonistic. Here I discuss how this is a misconception and explore its link to Reinforcement Learning. Based on the letters of Epicurus, I construct an objective function for hedonism which turns out to be equivalent of the Reinforcement Learning objective function when omitting the discount factor. I then discuss how Plato and Aristotle 's views that can be also loosely linked to Reinforcement Learning, as well as their weaknesses in relationship to it. Finally, I emphasise the close affinity of the Epicurean views and the Bellman equation.