Well, you can see how labeling some nodes as “can” and some as “can’t” could be useful, I’m sure. The “woulds” tell the agent what it can do from a given node, i.e., what nodes are connected to this node and how much pay off there is for choosing this node. The should labels are calculated from the “woulds” and utility function, i.e., the should label’s value tells the agent to take the action or not take it.
I’m not trying to solve the specific parts of the problem in this post, I’m trying to pose the problem so that we can work out the specific parts; that’s why it is called “Towards a New Decision Theory for Parallel Agents” rather than “A New Decision Theory for Parallel Agents”. That’s also why I am trying to assemble a team of people to help me work out the more specific parts of the problem. What you quoted was a suggestion I gave to any team that might pursue the goal of an axiomatic parallel decision theory independently, any such team, I would imagine, would understand what I meant by it, specially if they looked at the link right above it:
Well, you can see how labeling some nodes as “can” and some as “can’t” could be useful, I’m sure. The “woulds” tell the agent what it can do from a given node, i.e., what nodes are connected to this node and how much pay off there is for choosing this node. The should labels are calculated from the “woulds” and utility function, i.e., the should label’s value tells the agent to take the action or not take it.
I’m not trying to solve the specific parts of the problem in this post, I’m trying to pose the problem so that we can work out the specific parts; that’s why it is called “Towards a New Decision Theory for Parallel Agents” rather than “A New Decision Theory for Parallel Agents”. That’s also why I am trying to assemble a team of people to help me work out the more specific parts of the problem. What you quoted was a suggestion I gave to any team that might pursue the goal of an axiomatic parallel decision theory independently, any such team, I would imagine, would understand what I meant by it, specially if they looked at the link right above it:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/174/decision_theory_why_we_need_to_reduce_could_would/ .