This document provides an introduction to reinforcement learning. It discusses how reinforcement learning agents interact with environments to maximize rewards. It covers key concepts like the reinforcement learning problem, aspects of RL agents including policies and value functions, and popular approaches like value-based, policy-based, and model-based RL. Examples of applying RL to problems like process control, Atari games, and robotics are presented. The document aims to provide context and motivation for using reinforcement learning.