Ian Televan

While I agree that the algorithm might output 5, I don't share the intuition that it's something that wasn't 'supposed' to happen, so I'm not sure what problem it was meant to demonstrate. I thought of a few ways to interpret it, but I'm not sure which one, if any, was the intended interpretation:

a) The algorithm is defined to compute argmax, but it doesn't output argmax because of false antecedents. 

- but I would say that it's not actually defined to compute argmax, therefore the fact that it doesn't output argmax is not a problem.

b) Regardless of th... (read more)

I don't quite follow why 5/10 example presents a problem.

Conditionals with false antecedents seem nonsensical from the perspective of natural language, but why is this a problem for the formal agent? Since the algorithm as presented doesn't actually try to maximize utility, everything seems to be alright. In particular, there are 4 valid assignments: $p_1:(x=0,y=10,A()=10,U()=10)$, $p_2:(x=5,y=0,A()=5,U()=5)$, $p_3:(x=5,y=10,A()=10,U()=10)$, $p_4:(x=10,y=10,A()=10,U()=10)$

The algorithm doesn't try to select an assignment with largest $U\left(\right)$, but ... (read more)