Research on Real-Time Decision Making: The Ralph Project

这是REU对IRI-9211512的补充奖励。RALPH（有限性能硬件的理性代理）项目的目标是理解有限的计算资源对最优决策系统设计的影响。迄今为止的工作已经为控制计算指定了元推理的规范理论，并将其应用于几个组合问题类；在所有情况下，都记录了比标准算法显著的性能改进。应用这一理论的方法已经得到了详细的发展，并已被其他研究人员用于解决复杂问题。PI将继续研究更通用的决策理论金属级架构；概率计划和调度系统；并组成了实时系统，取得了初步的结果。将开发一个软件环境，允许从基本的软实时组件自动构造复杂的实时代理。该建议的最后一个要素是构造可证明的最优有界代理。首先在一类简单的基于规则的机器中工作，将显示学习算法可以快速收敛到近似最优规则集。这些结果将被扩展到寻找实现有限理性的自适应方法的范围和局限性，从而为人工智能科学的基础做出贡献。

9211512 Russell This is a REU supplemental award to IRI-9211512. The objective of the RALPH (Rational Agents with Limited Performance Hardware) project is to understand the effect of limited computational resources on the design of optimal decision-making systems. Work to date has specified a normative theory of metareasoning to control computation, and has applied it to several combinatorial problem classes; in all cases significant performance improvements over standard algorithms have been record. The methodology for applying the theory has been developed in detail, and has been used by other researchers to solve complex problems. The PI will continue to work on more general decision-theoretic metalevel architectures; probabilistic planning and scheduling systems; and composition of real-time systems, for which preliminary results have been obtained. A software environment will be developed that allows complex real-time agents to be constructed automatically from elementary soft-real-time components. A final element of the proposal is the construction of provably optimal bounded agents. Working initially in a class of simple rile-based machines, it will be shown that a learning algorithm can converge quickly to an approximately optimal rule set. These results will be extended to find the scope and limits of adaptive methods for achieving bounded rationality, thereby contributing to the foundation for a science of artificial intelligence.