Time-Dependent Utility and Action Under Uncertainty
This work addresses the challenge of decision-making under uncertainty for agents with limited computational resources, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing concepts without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of representing and reasoning with time-dependent utility in agents' actions under bounded resources, presenting a semantics for such utility and illustrating its application in time-pressured reasoning with examples from the Protos system.
We discuss representing and reasoning with knowledge about the time-dependent utility of an agent's actions. Time-dependent utility plays a crucial role in the interaction between computation and action under bounded resources. We present a semantics for time-dependent utility and describe the use of time-dependent information in decision contexts. We illustrate our discussion with examples of time-pressured reasoning in Protos, a system constructed to explore the ideal control of inference by reasoners with limit abilities.