There's a lot of confusion about what coherence means for agents, and what "coherence theorems" do and don't say about agents. In this post, I'll talk about some particularly simple notions of coherence in a particularly simple setting. We'll see what nontrivial things coherence has to say, at least in a simple kind of environment, starting with an analogous notion of coherence for caches.

What Kind Of "Coherence" We're Talking About Here

Let's start with a standard CS-101-style example. We write a recursive python function to compute fibonacci numbers:

We pass in n = 0, then n = 1, then 2, then 3, etc. It spits out 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, .... Great. Buuuuut it gets very slow very quickly as n increases; the [...]

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Outline:

(00:28) What Kind Of Coherence Were Talking About Here

(04:52) Value Cache

(09:57) Generalization: Agents Value Function/Cache

(11:49) Coherence Is Not Utility-Dependent

(14:23) Coherence of Policies

(19:43) Summary and Takeaways

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