Reviewing the fundamentals of PyTorch

As we’ve already mentioned, PyTorch is the numerical computation library we use to implement reinforcement learning algorithms in this book.

PyTorch is a trendy scientific computing and machine learning (including deep learning) library developed by Facebook. Tensor is the core data structure in PyTorch, which is similar to NumPy's ndarrays. PyTorch and NumPy are comparable in scientific computing. However, PyTorch is faster than NumPy in array operations and array traversing. This is mainly due to the fact that array element access is faster in PyTorch. Hence, more and more people believe PyTorch will replace NumPy.