Thanks Adam for the feedback—glad you enjoyed the post!
For the Lego example, the agent received a fixed shaping reward for grasping the red brick if the bottom face was above a certain height (3cm), rather than being rewarded in proportion to the height of the bottom face. Thus, it found an easy way to collect the shaping reward by flipping the brick, while stacking it upside down on the blue brick would be a more difficult way to get the same shaping reward. The current description of the example in the post does make it sound like the reward is proportional to the height—I’ll make a note to fix this in a later version of the post.
Thanks Adam for the feedback—glad you enjoyed the post!
For the Lego example, the agent received a fixed shaping reward for grasping the red brick if the bottom face was above a certain height (3cm), rather than being rewarded in proportion to the height of the bottom face. Thus, it found an easy way to collect the shaping reward by flipping the brick, while stacking it upside down on the blue brick would be a more difficult way to get the same shaping reward. The current description of the example in the post does make it sound like the reward is proportional to the height—I’ll make a note to fix this in a later version of the post.
Ok, that makes much more sense. I was indeed assuming a proportional reward.