Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning

BRANK

We've discovered that evolution strategies (ES), an optimization technique that's been known for decades, rivals the performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) techniques on modern RL benchmarks (e.g. Atari/MuJoCo), while overcoming many of RL's inconveniences. In particular, ES is simpler to implement (there is no need for backpropagation)