The meaning of discount factor on reinforcement learning
The discount factor does not represent the likelihood to reach the state $s′ $from the state $s$. That would be $p(s'|s,a)$, which is not used in Q-Learning, since it is model-free (only model-based reinforcement learning methods use those transition probabilities).
The discount factor $γ$ is a hyperparameter tuned by the user which represents how much future events lose their value according to how far away in time they are. In the referred formula, you are saying that the value $y$ for your current state $s$ is the instantaneous reward for this state plus what you expect to receive in the future starting from $s$. But that future term must be discounted, because future rewards may not (if $γ &lt; 1$) have the same value as receiving a reward right now (just like we prefer to receive \$100 now instead of \$100 tomorrow). It is up to you to chose how much you want to depreciate your future rewards (it is problem-dependent). A discount factor of 0 would mean that you only care about immediate rewards. The higher your discount factor, the farther your rewards will propagate through time.

I suggest that you read the Sutton &amp; Barto book before trying Deep-Q in order to learn pure Reinforcement Learning outside the context of neural networks, which may be confusing you.