The Bayes Bandit

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Mobile note: this post is meant to be read on a computer. Several figures are interactive and use wide layouts, hover states, sliders, and precise clicks, so they may not work as intended on a phone or small tablet. This is one of the most important questions of the entire field of Artificial Intelligence. The whole field of dataset curation will go away once a good mathematical framework of curiosity emerges. Hopefully, this blog post will be the first part of a series of increasingly complex environments where I explain/derive the mathematical foundations of curiosity. The 𝐾 K-armed bandit problem is perhaps one of the worst-named pieces of math. However, it has important applications in reinforcement learning. Let's see how it works. You walk into a room with 𝐾 K slot machines. Each one pays out a noisy reward drawn from its own Gaussian distribution — you don't know the means, you don't know the variances, and you have a finite number of pulls. Your job is to earn as much money

The Bayes Bandit What is Curiosity? Mathematically? Authors Affiliations Francesco Sacco None Date 2025 Code github.com/Francesco215/Bayes-bandit Mobile note: this post is meant to be read on a computer. Several figures are interactive and use wide layouts, hover states, sliders, and precise clicks, so they may not work as intended on a phone or small tablet. This is one of the most important questions of the entire field of Artificial Intelligence. The whole field of dataset curation will go away once a good mathematical framework of curiosity emerges. Hopefully, this blog post will be the fi

The Bayes Bandit

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