Class Project Due at end of finals week Essentially anything you want, so long as it’s AI related and I approve Any programming language you want In pairs or individual me by Wednesday, November 3

Projects Implementing Knn to Classify Bedform Stability Fields Blackjack Using Genetic Algorithms Computer game players:Go, Checkers, Connect Four, Chess, Poker Computer puzzle solvers: Minesweeper, mazes Pac-Man with intelligent monsters Genetic algorithms: blackjack strategy Automated 20-questions player Paper on planning Neural network spam filter Learning neural networks via GAs

Projects Solving neural networks via backprop Code decryptor using Gas Box pushing agent (competing against an opponent)

What didn’t work as well Too complicated games: Risk, Yahtzee, Chess, Scrabble, Battle Simulation Got too focused in making game work I sometimes had trouble running the game Game was often incomplete Didn’t have time to do enough AI Problems that were too vague Simulated ant colonies / genetic algorithms Bugs swarming for heat (emergent intelligence never happened) Finding paths through snow AdaBoost on protein folding data Couldn’t get boosting working right, needed more time on small datasets (spent lots of time parsing protein data)

Reinforcement Learning Game playing: So far, we have told the agent the value of a given board position. How can agent learn which positions are important? Play whole bunch of games, and receive reward at end (+ or -) How to determine utility of states that aren’t ending states?

The setup: Possible game states Terminal states have reward Mission: Estimate utility of all possible game states

What is a state? For chess: state is a combination of position on board and location of opponents Half of your transitions are controlled by you (your moves) Other half of your transitions are probabilistic (depend on opponent) For now, we assume all moves are probabilistic (probabilities unknown)

Passive Learning Agent learns by “watching” Fixed probability of moving from one state to another

Sample Results

Technique #1: Naive Updating Also known as Least Mean Squares (LMS) approach Starting at home, obtain sequence of states to terminal state Utility of terminal state = reward loop back over all other states utility for state i = running average of all rewards seen for state i

Naive Updating Analysis Works, but converges slowly Must play lots of games Ignores that utility of a state should depend on successor

Technique #2: Adaptive Dynamic Programming Utility of a state depends entirely on the successor state If a state has one successor, utility should be the same If a state has multiple successors, utility should be expected value of successors

Finding the utilities To find all utilities, just solve equations Set of linear equations, solveable Changes each iteration as you learn probabilities Completely intractable for large problems: For a real game, it means finding actual utilities of all states

Technique 3: Temporal Difference Learning Want utility to depend on successors, but want to solve iteratively Whenever you observe a transition from i to j:  = learning rate difference between successive states = temporal difference Converges faster than Naive updating

Active Learning Probability of going from one state to another now depends on action ADP equations are now:

Active Learning Active Learning with Temporal Difference Learning: works the same way (assuming you know where you’re going) Also need to learn probabilities to eventually make decision on where to go

Exploration: where should agent go to learn utilities? Suppose you’re trying to learn optimal game playing strategies Do you follow best utility, in order to win? Do you move around at random, hoping to learn more (and losing lots in the process)? Following best utility all the time can get you stuck at an imperfect solution Following random moves can lose a lot

Where should agent go to learn utilities? f(u,n) = exploration function depends on utility of move (u), and number of times that agent has tried it (n) One possibility: instead of using utility to decide where to go, use Try a move a bunch of times, then eventually settle

Q-learning Alternative approach for temporal difference learning No need to learn probabilities: considered more desirable sometimes Instead, looking for “quality” of (state, action) pair

Generalization in Reinforcement Learning Maintaining utilities for all seen states in a real game is intractable. Instead, treat it as a supervised learning problem Training set consists of (state, utility) pairs Or, alternatively, (state, action, q-value) triples Learn to predict utility from state This is a regression problem, not a classification problem Radial basis function neural networks (hidden nodes are Gaussians instead of sigmoids) Support vector machines for regression Etc…

Other applications Applies to any situation where something is to learn from reinforcement Possible examples: Toy robot dogs Petz That darn paperclip “The only winning move is not to play”