An object retrieval protocol that enforces mutually exclusive access to a shared object is an important primitive employed by many distributed applications including distributed directories, distributed resource sharing systems and ordered multicast protocols, to name a few. Most existing implementations of this object retrieval primitive use a tree as the underlying communication structure due...

We present a variant of the Q-learning algorithm with automatic control of the exploration rate by a competition scheme. The theoretical approach is accompanied by systematic simulations of a chaos control task. Finally, we give interpretations of the algorithm in the context of computational ecology and neural networks.