[comp.ai.neural-nets] Pole Balancer by Adaptive Heuristic Critic

sammut@qut.edu.au (David Sammut) (04/19/91)

I am currently working at implementing the broom balancing problem using
an adaptive heuristic critic much like in the paper by Barto, Sutton and
Anderson called "Neuronlike Adaptive Elements That Can Solve Difficult
Learning Control Problems".  However, I am not implementing the decoder as
shown in the paper (that decodes the input vector into 162 binary values of
which only one has been set) but attempting to use this input vector as
straight input into the network.

My reason for atttempting this is because the book in which I got my
original AHC algorithm from said that it was capable of accepting analog
inputs (e.g. the component values of the vectors should do).  Is it
possible to solve the problem in this way?  It seems that it begins to learn
(the time before failure improves on the first 20 or so training runs) but
then declines slowly(forgets?) so that the pole is eventually failing in near
minimum time.


Any thoughts anyone ?  I'd be extremely grateful for any helpful suggestions.



(The book that I got the algorithm from was called Artificial Neural Systems -
 Foundations, Paradigms, Applications, and Implementations (Patrick K Simpson).
 It is quite a good book for an overview of the various paradigms that have
 been developed.)


David Sammut


+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| David Sammut                         |                                |
| School of Computing Science          |                                |
| Faculty of Information Technology    |    email:  sammut@qut.edu.au   |
| Queensland University of Technology  |                                |
| Brisbane, Queensland, Australia      |                                |
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