Spudd Review

From: Stanley Kok (koks_at_cs.washington.edu)
Date: Sun Apr 20 2003 - 11:37:25 PDT

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    Title: Review of Spudd Planner

    Spudd is a planner that uses value-iteration and its novelty lies
    in the use of Algebraic Decision Diagrams to compactly represent
    its value and policy functions.

    It is easy to get Spudd up and running quickly with the aid of its
    README file. However, it does not document the semantics of the
    files containing the policy and value functions. After comparing
    the file contents and the corresponding online diagrams, it is
    possible to decipher the file semantics.
    Even though the pquery tool is useful for querying large .dot files
    (policy and value function files), it does not display the
    structure of the policy and value function. It will be a bonus if
    the Spudd package has such a tool for the visualization of the
    policies and value functions as shown on its online diagrams.

    It is interesting to compare Spudd's performance on worst case and
    best case problems. It took about 5 mins to solve the expon12.dat
    problem but only about 0.30 secs to solve the linear12.dat one (a
    difference of approximately 1000x).

    By examining the statistics file for a problem, one can see how
    concise the ADD representation is. For example, the total number
    of nodes in the ADD for the expon12.dat problem is 24 whereas that
    for the equivalent decision tree is 8191.


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