How can we learn efficiently to act optimally and flexibly?

摘要

When we walk to a shop in a town, we want to get there in the shortest time. However, finding the shortest route in a big city is quite tricky, because there are countless possible routes and the time taken for each segment of a route is uncertain. This is a typical problem of discrete optimal control, which aims to find the optimal sequence of actions to minimize the total cost from any given state to the goal state. The problems of optimal control are ubiquitous, from animal foraging to national economic policy, and there have been lots of theoretical studies on the topic.