Reasoning About When to Start Acting
Richard Goodwin,
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Faced with a complicated task, some initial planning can significantly
increase the likelihood of success and increase efficiency, but planning
for too long before starting to act can reduce efficiency. This paper
explores the question of when to begin acting for a resource bounded
agent. Limitations of an idealized algorithm suggested in the
literature are presented and illustrated in the context of a robot
courier. A revised, idealized algorithm is given and justified. The
revised idealized algorithm is used as a basis for developing a new
``step choice'' algorithm for making on-the-fly decisions for a
simplified version of the robot courier task. A set of experiments are
used to illustrate the relative advantage of the new strategy over
always act, always compute and anytime algorithm based strategies for
deciding when to begin execution.
Postscript