Second Annual RL Competition

The real-time strategy domain provides the kind of structure that an approach like junction tree reinforcement learning could exploit. If only there were a vector-valued reward signal ...

Jill took Lucy to the groomer's this afternoon. She's seven months old now, and hasn't lost her fondness for athletic shoes, the smellier the better. I have two pairs of Adidas with little pinprick bite marks in the upper and the shoelaces frayed to dereliction; Jill has sacrificed a pair of black flip-flops on the altar of puppyhood. If we're good dogparents, we take up her food and water around 8 and she sleeps through the night (after a half-hour of mauling our books, magazines, wrists and toes into submission.) If not, she wakes one of us up around 4AM and demands to be let out. We've taken to leaving the screen door open and letting her find her own way outside (which she seems to do pretty reliably), and (to the great relief of our downstairs neighbors) we have acquired a Pet-a-Potty.

Sunday night: Jill and I are in a car with Jeff and Stasia and Jaro, on our way to a ferry terminal. The car is right-hand drive, so we're in Europe. (Actually, our surroundings look a lot like the tunnel turn of the Monaco F1 circuit.) Next thing I know, we're on a Greek island, in a thatched-roof cottage near the harbor of some resort village. The place is overrun by American kids on spring break, some of whom are zipping around overhead on cruise missiles. For real. Flat-gray, scissor-winged, jet-powered cruise missiles. And the college kids are straddling these things like they're jet skis, flying about fifty feet off the ground, and every time they pass overhead I feel like my eardrums are going to explode.

I rarely have dreams with a visceral sensory component. I usually see what's happening; sometimes I have conversations. The only other dream that I can recall where I actually felt the experience I saw was the one I had (in high school, I think) where I was forced to eject from a space capsule before it had re-entered. I spent about a minute in free-fall, watching the sky change from black to twilight to blue, before I woke up. (I didn't have a chance to find out whether I wore a working parachute or not.)

On the upside, Lucy slept through the night for the second night in a row, and may have found her way to the patio when nature called without our prompting. (Or else she just wanted to maul the pink-hedgehog squeaky toy lurking under the grill.) Sleeping through the night is a big deal; it means Jill and I can get closer to the ten hours a night that we deserve. On the downside, Lucy has started to develop a fondness for my running shoes bordering on obsession. (They fill the void left in her life when Jill refused to let her chew on a well-worn pair of Naots.) I figure that it's healthier than letting her chase her own tail for hours at a time ...