Tuesday, September 20, 2005

I Need a Better State Representation

I'm trying to come up with a better way to represent the current state. Right now I use the "boxes" approach, as described in the last post. Another idea is "tile coding" (aka CMAC) described in Sutton & Barto's RL book. I think the boxes method is like having a single tiling, but in general you could have any number of tilings, each offset a little from the others. That means that with 5 tilings over some input space, you would have 5 active tiles, one from each tiling. Tile coding would give better generalization than using the simple boxes approach. Also, there are ways to use hashing to reduce the memory needed; memory would only be allocated when new states are encountered.

It would be nice to have an array of states where only the "important" states are represented. This could even be dynamic where newly encountered states are compared to the existing list of states. If a new state is different enough, it would be added to the list.

There are a lot of things I could try, but I want to finish adding new features and testing before October, then write my thesis in November. So if I'm going to improve the state representation, I don't want to have to try anything too experimental.

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