A nice advice from Andrew about Multi-Armed Bandits

Small technical considerations about terminology:

First, and less importantly, each slot machine (or “bandit”) only has one arm. Hence it’s many one-armed bandits, not one multi-armed bandit.

Second, the basic strategy in these problems is to play on lots of machines until you find out which is the best, and then concentrate your plays on that best machine. This all presupposes that either (a) you’re required to play, or (b) at least one of the machines has positive expected value. But with slot machines, they all have negative expected value for the player (that’s why they’re called “bandits”), and the best strategy is not to play at all. So the whole analogy seems backward to me.