A solution to the stochastic point location problem in metalevel nonstationary environments.

2008

This paper reports the first known solution to the stochastic point location (SPL) problem when the environment is nonstationary. The SPL problem involves a general learning problem in which the learning mechanism (which could be a robot, a learning automaton, or, in general, an algorithm) attempts to learn a "parameter," for example, lambda*, within a closed interval. However, unlike the earlier reported results, we consider the scenario when the learning is to be done in a nonstationary setting. For each guess, the environment essentially informs the mechanism, possibly erroneously (i.e., with probability p), which way it should move to reach the unknown point. Unlike the results availabl…