I have not written anything directly related to my project there. You may wonder whether this guy is a machine learning student or a philosophy student. (; Anyway, I may change my high-security-with-copyrighted-material situation if everything goes this way. However, I try to write something about my project – wish it be fun and encouraging!
Let’s briefly discuss what I have done up to now:
As you know, I am working on learning in behavior-based systems. I have chosen Subsumption architecture as a base architecture due its success in designing a lot of behavior-based systems. I decomposed the learning process to two different situations: 1) structure learning, 2) behavior learning.
In the former case, I have supposed that the designer know how each behavior is working and s/he wants the learning mechanism places each behavior in its correct place. S/he guides this process by giving the agent a reinforcement signal that rewards or punishes its action. In the later case, the designer knows the correct structure of the architecture, but s/he is not aware of the way each behavior must act. For instance, s/he knows that there must be an obstacle avoidance behavior superior to any other behaviors, but s/he does not know what an appropriate action in each case is.
To learn a behavior-based system, one must solve these two problems. What I have done by now is trying to solve these two problems in a special case. I have got some partial results, but the problem is not solved completely.