Personally, I would argue that David Silver's body of work at DeepMind is making a very strong case in favor of "simple reward + lots of compute". Richard Sutto

Personally, I would argue that David Silver's body of work at DeepMind is making a very strong case in favor of "simple reward + lots of compute". Richard Sutton wrote about this back in 2019 as The Bitter Lesson[1]. An important note is that David Silver did his PhD under Sutton. Quite frankly, it's been a while since I've read through Silver's papers, but the original Deep Q-Networks paper[2] is probably a good start. 1: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson... 2: https://daiwk.github.io/assets/dqn.pdf https://daiwk.github.io/assets/dqn.pdf