Dynamic real-time hierarchical heuristic search for pathfinding.

Movement of Units in Real-Time Strategy (RTS) Games is a non-trivial and challenging task mainly due to three factors which are constraints on CPU and memory usage, dynamicity of the game world, and concurrency. In this paper, we are focusing on finding a novel solution for solving the pathfinding problem in RTS Games for the units which are controlled by the computer. The novel solution combines two AI Planning approaches: Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) and Real-Time Heuristic Search (RHS). In the proposed solution, HTNs are used as a dynamic abstraction of the game map while RHS works as planning engine with interleaving of plan making and action executions. The article provides algorithmic details of the model while the empirical details of the model are obtained by using a real-time strategy game engine called ORTS (Open Real-time Strategy). The implementation of the model and its evaluation methods are in progress however the results of the automatic HTN creation are obtained for a small scale game map

Political Ignorance and Policy Preferences

Large proportions of the electorate can best be described as politically ignorant. If casting a competent vote requires some basic knowledge of the incumbent’s identity, the workings of the political system, one’s own policy preferences and the policy preferences of the main candidates, many voters cannot vote competently. Wittman (1989) suggests that, if ignorance is unbiased, overall results will be determined by informed voters as the ignorant cancel each other out. Lupia and McCubbins (1998) provides a mechanism whereby voters with little information can take cues from more informed colleagues in order to vote as if they had the requisite information. Using data from a uniquely useful dataset, the 2005 New Zealand Election Survey, I show that both mechanisms fail. Political ignorance is not unbiased: rather, it strongly predicts policy and political party preferences after correcting for the demographic correlates of ignorance. Moreover, membership in the kinds of organizations held to allow the ignorant to overcome their deficiencies fails to improve outcomes. Voter ignorance remains a very serious problem

Educational Considerations, vol. 28 (1) Full Issue

Educational Considerations, vol. 28 (1) Fall 2000 - Full issu

Table of contents and editorial information for Vol. 28, no. 1, Fall 2000

Table of contents and editorial information for Vol. 28, no. 1, Fall 200

State Funding for Education Technology and School Infrastructure: Competing Demands and Limited Resources

In spite of signs of an economic recovery at the national level, many states still face formidable fiscal problems. In addition, the national fiscal outlook is compromised by a growing federal deficit, slow growth in job creation, and lingering unemployment in many parts of the country

Foreword

This edition of Educational Considerations is devoted to education finance issues of national importance in the twenty-first century

The Economics and Financing of Urban Schools: Toward a Productive, Solution-Oriented Discourse

Across the nation, a surprising number of both critics and advocates of urban schools demonstrate a naïveté about the limits and possibilities of funding in relationship to the academic success of urban students

Emergent Student Practices: Unintended Consequences in a Dialogic, Collaborative Classroom

It’s a commonplace to decry the folly of “best practices” in education. They make many practitioners and researchers twitch, fearing that the good-- or even just decent--practice will soon be setting the tempo in the steady march toward standardization. The argument against best practices, then, is the argument against one-size-fits-all pedagogy. Instructional practices must come with a necessary humility, based on situating students within the picture, with particular attention to with histories of institutional and societal othering and marginalization. Good practices cannot be delivered or imposed, and therefore, if successful, they become suggestions or starting points carried out with greater and lesser “fidelity,” and informed by the cultures of school, teacher, and students. This study of a middle school science classroom in a racially and economically diverse urban charter school looks at how the laudable practices of dialogic, inquiry-based STEM instruction and the concomitant agenda of collaboration and inclusion were exceeded and transformed by students in moment-to-moment interactions. The focal students engaged in talk that carried them beyond disciplinary boundaries to explore stereotypes and create new narratives around racial identities, all while asserting their own positions within the power dynamics of the classroom and small group. As activity systems analysis and narrative discourse analysis revealed, the larger classroom culture permitted this kind of extra-disciplinary knowledge construction; the teacher’s practices gave rise to the emergence of alternative, student-made practices, resulting in unintended consequences that remained largely unmonitored and unsung. We have much to learn from such creative and engaged acts as examples of student work that constitute a worthy academic discourse, a deviation from the imagined best path to a different route that was unpredicted by the teacher, and only owned in the moment by students, as makers and users, and primary practitioners