Practical Play of the Dice Game Pig

The object of the jeopardy dice game Pig is to be the first player to reach 100 points. Each turn, a player repeatedly rolls a die until either a 1 is rolled or the player holds and scores the sum of the rolls (i.e., the turn total). At any time during a player’s turn, the player is faced with two choices: roll or hold. If the player rolls a 1, the player scores nothing and it becomes the opponent’s turn. If the player rolls a number other than 1, the number is added to the player’s turn total and the player’s turn continues. If the player instead chooses to hold, the turn total is added to the player’s score and it becomes the opponent’s turn. In our original article [Neller and Presser 2004], we described a means to compute optimal play for Pig. However, optimal play is surprisingly complex and beyond human potential to memorize and apply. In this paper, we mathematically explore a more subjective question: What is the simplest human-playable policy that most closely approximates optimal play? While one cannot enumerate and search the space of all possible simple policies for Pig play, our exploration will present interesting insights and yield a surprisingly good policy that one can play by memorizing only three integers and using simple mental arithmetic. [excerpt

Advances in Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and application. This book brings together many different aspects of the current research on several fields associated to RL which has been growing rapidly, producing a wide variety of learning algorithms for different applications. Based on 24 Chapters, it covers a very broad variety of topics in RL and their application in autonomous systems. A set of chapters in this book provide a general overview of RL while other chapters focus mostly on the applications of RL paradigms: Game Theory, Multi-Agent Theory, Robotic, Networking Technologies, Vehicular Navigation, Medicine and Industrial Logistic

The Message is Murder

The Message is Murder analyses the violence bound up in the everyday functions of digital media. At its core is the concept of 'computational capital' - the idea that capitalism itself is a computer, turning qualities into quantities, and that the rise of digital culture and technologies under capitalism should be seen as an extension of capitalism's bloody logic. Engaging with Borges, Turing, Claude Shannon, Hitchcock and Marx, this book tracks computational capital to reveal the lineages of capitalised power as it has restructured representation, consciousness and survival in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately The Message is Murder makes the case for recognising media communications across all platforms - books, films, videos, photographs and even language itself - as technologies of political economy, entangled with the social contexts of a capitalism that is inherently racial, gendered and genocidal

Abstracts on Radio Direction Finding (1899 - 1995)

The files on this record represent the various databases that originally composed the CD-ROM issue of "Abstracts on Radio Direction Finding" database, which is now part of the Dudley Knox Library's Abstracts and Selected Full Text Documents on Radio Direction Finding (1899 - 1995) Collection. (See Calhoun record https://calhoun.nps.edu/handle/10945/57364 for further information on this collection and the bibliography). Due to issues of technological obsolescence preventing current and future audiences from accessing the bibliography, DKL exported and converted into the three files on this record the various databases contained in the CD-ROM. The contents of these files are: 1) RDFA_CompleteBibliography_xls.zip [RDFA_CompleteBibliography.xls: Metadata for the complete bibliography, in Excel 97-2003 Workbook format; RDFA_Glossary.xls: Glossary of terms, in Excel 97-2003 Workbookformat; RDFA_Biographies.xls: Biographies of leading figures, in Excel 97-2003 Workbook format]; 2) RDFA_CompleteBibliography_csv.zip [RDFA_CompleteBibliography.TXT: Metadata for the complete bibliography, in CSV format; RDFA_Glossary.TXT: Glossary of terms, in CSV format; RDFA_Biographies.TXT: Biographies of leading figures, in CSV format]; 3) RDFA_CompleteBibliography.pdf: A human readable display of the bibliographic data, as a means of double-checking any possible deviations due to conversion

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Both Into and Out of the Cage: New Media, Transgression, and the Remaking of American Literary Connection, 1975-1999

The dissertation addresses an absent history of late twentieth-century postmodern literature. Namely, I trace the shifts between 1980s postmodernism, described by Fredric Jameson as encapsulating a “wan[ed]”“affect,” and the emergence of 1990s post-postmodernism, marked by an exaggeration of affect. My dissertation posits that this reinvention of feeling was due to shifts in communication technologies and new media art during the 1970s and 1980s competing with, and eventually rendering obsolete, avant-garde literary techniques for “connection.” These latter strategies were encapsulated in the postmodern “encyclopedic” novel, a form miming the logic of new media, yet incapable of fully addressing new programmatic shifts, such as the installation-centered apparatuses of new media, the textual depth of digitalism, and posthuman data used for characterization. The strain of this pseudo-computational organization and ethic, however, leads to the pursuit of “feeling” on a more visceral basis. Pursuant with this visceral intention, I posit the genre of transgressive literature, usually misunderstood as employing simple-minded shock tactics, as a hinge point between postmodern and post-postmodern conceptions of “feeling.” Transgressive literature, I argue, offers systematic, new-media-like schemas to explore moments of emotional excess or visceral shock, allowing a further bridge to post-postmodernist writers like David Foster Wallace, who explore affect within complex, maximalist schemas. In essence, the study supplies a media analysis of American postmodernism’s demise and return long missing. Such a study is integral to any complete history of postmodernism or consideration of the experimental literature that follows it