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Does the name "Multi-Armed Bandits" have anything to do with "One Armed Bandits" - old style slot machine/fruit machines/gambling machines with a big lever that people would pull?

edit: ah ok yes it does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit



Yes. The paper explains the basic model as so:

"We consider the basic model with IID rewards, called stochastic bandits. An algorithm has K possible actions to choose from, a.k.a. arms, and there are T rounds, for some known K and T . In each round, the algorithm chooses an arm and collects a reward for this arm. The algorithm’s goal is to maximize its total reward over the T rounds."




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