Upper Confidence Tree-Based Consistent Reactive Planning Application to MineSweeper

Many reactive planning tasks are tackled through myopic optimization-based approaches. Specifically, the problem is simplified by only considering the observations available at the current time step and an estimate of the future system behavior; the optimal decision on the basis of this information is computed and the simplified problem description is updated on the basis of the new observations available in each time step. While this approach does not yield optimal strategies

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, it indeed gives good results at a reasonable computational cost for highly intractable problems, whenever fast off-the-shelf solvers are available for the simplified problem.

The increase of available computational power − even though the search for optimal strategies remains intractable with brute-force approaches − makes it however possible to go beyond the intrinsic limitations of myopic reactive planning approaches.

A consistent reactive planning approach is proposed in this paper, embedding a solver with an Upper Confidence Tree algorithm. While the solver is used to yield a consistent estimate of the belief state, the UCT exploits this estimate (both in the tree nodes and through the Monte-Carlo simulator) to achieve an asymptotically optimal policy. The paper shows the consistency of the proposed

Upper Confidence Tree-based Consistent Reactive Planning

algorithm and presents a proof of principle of its performance on a classical success of the myopic approach, the MineSweeper game.