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Showing posts from September, 2009

Constrained MDPs and the reward hypothesis

It's been a looong ago that I posted on this blog. But this should not mean the blog is dead. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Anyhow, I am back and today I want to write about constrained Markovian Decision Process (CMDPs). The post is prompted by a recent visit of Eugene Feinberg , a pioneer of CMDPs, of our department, and also by a growing interest in CMPDs in the RL community (see this , this , or this paper). For impatient readers, a CMDP is like an MDP except that there are multiple reward functions, one of which is used to set the optimization objective, while the others are used to restrict what policies can do. Now, it seems to me that more often than not the problems we want to solve are easiest to specify using multiple objectives (in fact, this is a borderline tautology!). An example, which given our current sad situation is hard to escape, is deciding what interventions a government should apply to limit the spread of a virus while maintaining economic

How to make Thunderbird delete temporary file

If you are using Thunderbird (TB) on Mac OSX , you might be annoyed by that when TB opens an attachment (like a pdf file) it creates the file on the Desktop and then leaves just it there! I have finally found a solution, which seems to work at least for me and assuming that you also have Firefox. The solution is here , but I duplicate it here to make sure the idea spreads: Simply open Firefox, in the address bar type in about:config , then add a boolean variable browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit and set its value to true . Now, this works to the extent that when you exit Firefox(!!) (after quitting Thunderbird), it will remove the cluttering files. Enjoy!