it's about a century old but the recent popularity of AI made more people aware of it, I personally became aware of it more than a decade while learning about r

it's about a century old but the recent popularity of AI made more people aware of it, I personally became aware of it more than a decade while learning about reinforcement learning (the old kind with GOFAI) but it's also used in social fields, biology stuff like foraging theory or really anything that involve an agent with a brain. here an n-gram of the first mentions: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Exploration-exploitation%2C+Exploration+exploitation&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Exploration-ex...