Photonic decision making for solving the multi-armed bandit problem has been reported recently. However, experimental studies have been limited owing to technological difficulties. In this study, we experimentally demonstrate photonic decision making for solving a large-scale multi-armed bandit problem using optical spatiotemporal chaos generated by a semiconductor laser, spatial light modulator, and camera. We implement a parallel configuration of decision making with up to 512 slot machines, which is much larger than the previous experiment by two orders of magnitude. We found better scaling characteristics between decision-making performance and the number of slot machines than those obtained from software-based algorithms.
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