Why are you treating time as infinite? Surely it’s finite, just taking unbounded values?
Even if at each moment the right action is to draw one more card, when you consider the overall strategy, the strategy of drawing cards for all time may be a wrong strategy.
But you’re not asked to decide a strategy for all of time. You can change your decision at every round freely.
But you’re not asked to decide a strategy for all of time. You can change your decision at every round freely.
You can’t change any fixed thing, you can only determine it. Change is a timeful concept. Change appears when you compare now and tomorrow, not when you compare the same thing with itself. You can’t change the past, and you can’t change the future. What you can change about the future is your plan for the future, or your knowledge: as the time goes on, your idea about a fact in the now becomes a different idea tomorrow.
When you “change” your strategy, what you are really doing is changing your mind about what you’re planning. The question you are trying to answer is what to actually do, what decisions to implement at each point. A strategy for all time is a generator of decisions at each given moment, an algorithm that runs and outputs a stream of decisions. If you know something about each particular decision, you can make a general statement about the whole stream. If you know that each next decision is going to be “accept” as opposed to “decline”, you can prove that the resulting stream is equivalent to an infinite stream that only answers “accept”, at all steps. And at the end, you have a process, the consequences of your decision-making algorithm consist in all of the decisions. You can’t change that consequence, as the consequence is what actually happens, if you changed your mind about making a particular decision along the way, the effect of that change is already factored in in the resulting stream of actions.
The consequentialist preference is going to compare the effect of the whole infinite stream of potential decisions, and until you know about the finiteness of the future, the state space is going to contain elements corresponding to the infinite decision traces. In this state space, there is an infinite stream corresponding to one deciding to continue picking cards for eternity.
I’m more or less talking just about infinite streams, which is a well-known structure in math. You can try looking at the following references. Or find something else.
P. Cousot & R. Cousot (1992). `Inductive definitions, semantics and abstract interpretations’. In POPL ’92: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, pp. 83-94, New York, NY, USA. ACM. http://www.di.ens.fr/~cousot/COUSOTpapers/POPL92.shtml
Why are you treating time as infinite? Surely it’s finite, just taking unbounded values?
But you’re not asked to decide a strategy for all of time. You can change your decision at every round freely.
You can’t change any fixed thing, you can only determine it. Change is a timeful concept. Change appears when you compare now and tomorrow, not when you compare the same thing with itself. You can’t change the past, and you can’t change the future. What you can change about the future is your plan for the future, or your knowledge: as the time goes on, your idea about a fact in the now becomes a different idea tomorrow.
When you “change” your strategy, what you are really doing is changing your mind about what you’re planning. The question you are trying to answer is what to actually do, what decisions to implement at each point. A strategy for all time is a generator of decisions at each given moment, an algorithm that runs and outputs a stream of decisions. If you know something about each particular decision, you can make a general statement about the whole stream. If you know that each next decision is going to be “accept” as opposed to “decline”, you can prove that the resulting stream is equivalent to an infinite stream that only answers “accept”, at all steps. And at the end, you have a process, the consequences of your decision-making algorithm consist in all of the decisions. You can’t change that consequence, as the consequence is what actually happens, if you changed your mind about making a particular decision along the way, the effect of that change is already factored in in the resulting stream of actions.
The consequentialist preference is going to compare the effect of the whole infinite stream of potential decisions, and until you know about the finiteness of the future, the state space is going to contain elements corresponding to the infinite decision traces. In this state space, there is an infinite stream corresponding to one deciding to continue picking cards for eternity.
Thanks, I understand now.
Whoa.
Is there something I can take that would help me understand that better?
I’m more or less talking just about infinite streams, which is a well-known structure in math. You can try looking at the following references. Or find something else.
P. Cousot & R. Cousot (1992). `Inductive definitions, semantics and abstract interpretations’. In POPL ’92: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, pp. 83-94, New York, NY, USA. ACM. http://www.di.ens.fr/~cousot/COUSOTpapers/POPL92.shtml
J. J. M. M. Rutten (2003). `Behavioural differential equations: a coinductive calculus of streams, automata, and power series’. Theor. Comput. Sci. 308(1-3):1-53. http://www.cwi.nl/~janr/papers/files-of-papers/tcs308.pdf