BOXES Methodology Second Edition

This book focuses on how the BOXES Methodology, which is based on the work of Donald Michie, is applied to ill-defined real-time control systems with minimal a priori knowledge of the system. The method is applied to a variety of systems including the familiar pole and cart. This second edition includes a new section that covers some further observations and thoughts, problems, and evolutionary extensions that the reader will find useful in their own implementation of the method. This second edition includes a new section on how to handle jittering about a system boundary which in turn causes replicated run times to become part of the learning mechanism. It also addresses the aging of data values using a forgetfulness factor that causes wrong values of merit to be calculated. Another question that is addressed is "e;Should a BOXES cell ever be considered fully trained and, if so, excluded from further dynamic updates"e;. Finally, it expands on how system boundaries may be shifted using data from many runs using an evolutionary paradigm.