>>thebil+(OP)
Why is Facebook getting into reinforcement learning? Are there applications of RL to improving social connections or extracting more data to sell to advertisers?

>>thebil+(OP)
Also unrelated, but hopefully not flamebait: the code blocks run off my screen on an iPad because they’re too long. Having just fixed this issue on my own website yesterday, a bit of unsolicited advice: add “overflow: auto” to them and constrain them to the standard margins for your article.

>>mendez+Mo
If you take a look at the announcement post for the framework, you can see some discussion about that: https://code.fb.com/ml-applications/horizon/

One application that they mention related (at least loosely) to social connections is deciding whether or not to deliver a notification to a user.

>>mendez+Mo
I'd imagine that a company which exists entirely to collect huge amounts of data might have some interest in useful ways to automatically process that data.

>>mendez+Mo
Most likely to make the News Feed more engaging

>>civics+Ap
That makes sense. At Twitter, I redesigned the notifications system to explicitly allow for ML based decisions such as this.

>>saagar+Ro
This makes me so happy to see other delevopers help!!

>>civics+Ap
Any idea on what the objective function for such a thing would be?