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Comment by bratao | Hacker News Reader

Do anyone know what Q* is?

Q* is the optimal (ie, correct for the decision problem) function computing the total expected reward of taking an action from a given state in reinforcement learning.

That is just Q. The asterisk is new

The "star" in A* means optimal (as in actually proven to be optimal, so they could stop publishing A^[whatever] algorithms). I assume either Q* is considered optimal in a way regular Q-learning isn't, or they're mixing Q-learning with some A*-like search algorithm. (Or someone picked an undeserving name.)

Depends on the notation. Sometimes Q* is used to denote optimality, for example here : https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jlucas/teaching/csc411/lectures/... , page 31

Is far as I can tell, this is the first time an OpenAI project called Q* has been mentioned in the news. I don't see any prior mentions on Twitter either.

(I wish they'd picked a different letter, given all the Q-related conspiracy theories that we're already dealing with...)

That was my impression as well. Why the hell is the difference between one of the most prominent disinformation sources out there and a promising AI project just an asterisk.

First Twitter changes to X, then AI changes to Q*.

What happened to multi-syllable words? They used to be quite handy. Maybe if our attention spans shorten, so does our ability to use longer words. Weird. Or, said otherwise - TL;DR: LOL, ROFL.

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