We present two new question-guided stubborn set methods for state properties. The first method makes it possible to determine whether a marking is reachable in which a given state property holds. It generalises the results on stubborn sets for state properties recently suggested by Schmidt in the sense that that stubborn set method can be seen as an implementation of our more general method. We...

............................................................................................................................. iii Table of

For an n-person stochastic game with Borel state space S and compact metric action sets A1, A2, . . . , An, sufficient conditions are given for the existence of subgame perfect equilibria. One result is that such equilibria exist if the law of motion q(·|s, a) is, for fixed s, continuous in a = (a1, a2, . . . , an) for the total variation norm and the payoff functions f1, f2, . . . , fn are bou...

A heated debate in drug policy concerns the relative merits of ‘‘harm reduction” (e.g., reducing drugrelated HIV/AIDS transmission) vs. ‘‘use reduction” (controlling drug use per se). This paper models whether shifting emphasis between these goals over the course of a drug epidemic might reduce social costs relative to pursuing one or the other exclusively. Results suggest different answers for...

This paper presents a new method for the autonomous construction of hierarchical action and state representations in reinforcement learning, aimed at accelerating learning and extending the scope of such systems. In this approach, the agent uses information acquired while learning one task to discover subgoals for similar tasks. The agent is able to transfer knowledge to subsequent tasks and to...

In a recent paper, Hou and Hsu (1991) derive a state-space identii-cation method which apparently improves upon the results in (Moonen et al. 1989). Here we point out that neither one of these methods really applies to the examples given in the paper, and we give an outline of a method which should be used instead. In their paper, Hou and Hsu (1991) consider general state space models of the fo...