Abstract

In dynamic environments, optimal deliberation in the decision-theoretic sense is impossible. Instead, it is sometimes necessary to trade potential decision quality for decision timeliness. One approach to achieving this trade-off is to endow intelligent agents with meta-level strategies that provide them guidance about when to reason--- and what to reason about---and when to act instead. In this paper, we describe our investigations of a particular meta-level reasoning strategy, filtering, in which an agent commits to the goals it has already adopted, and then tends to filter from consideration new options that would conflict with the successful completion of existing goals [Bratman et al. 1988]. To investigate the utility of filtering, we conducted a series of experiments using the Tileworld testbed [Pollack and Ringuette 1990]. Previous experiments [Kinny and Georgeff 1991] provided preliminary evidence of the feasibility of filtering; our results generalize and refine those earlier ...

Citations