This is an overly restrictive view of RL. Yann's claim about the potential utility of RL, taken at face value, is clearly false. Backprop on a deterministic com

This is an overly restrictive view of RL. Yann's claim about the potential utility of RL, taken at face value, is clearly false. Backprop on a deterministic computation graph is equivalent to deterministic policy gradient in the same graph, where the reward is given by the value of the optimization objective.