I Added a Second Brain to My RL Agent - Day 7 (Actor-Critic)

SERIES: Learning RL and JAX in Public - from zero to DeepMind. Day 6 ended with REINFORCE working. The agent learned to navigate the gridworld using probabilities instead of Q-values. Clean idea, clean code. But it was noisy. Training was slow. Some episodes the agent got lucky, some unlucky, and the network kept getting confused by the difference. The signal was there but it was buried in too much variance. Day 7 is the fix. The basketball analogy that made it click Imagine a basketball player…