Towards adaptive programming: integrating reinforcement learning into a programming language

  • Authors:
  • Christopher Simpkins;Sooraj Bhat;Charles Isbell, Jr.;Michael Mateas

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages and applications
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Current programming languages and software engineering paradigms are proving insufficient for building intelligent multi-agent systems--such as interactive games and narratives--where developers are called upon to write increasingly complex behavior for agents in dynamic environments. A promising solution is to build adaptive systems; that is, to develop software written specifically to adapt to its environment by changing its behavior in response to what it observes in the world. In this paper we describe a new programming language, An Adaptive Behavior Language (A2BL), that implements adaptive programming primitives to support partial programming, a paradigm in which a programmer need only specify the details of behavior known at code-writing time, leaving the run-time system to learn the rest. Partial programming enables programmers to more easily encode software agents that are difficult to write in existing languages that do not offer language-level support for adaptivity. We motivate the use of partial programming with an example agent coded in a cutting-edge, but non-adaptive agent programming language (ABL), and show how A2BL can encode the same agent much more naturally.