Time to introduce some more concepts. If an observation is "any data you can receive which affects your actions", then there seem to be two sorts of observations. A plannable observation is the sort of observation where you could plan ahead of time how to react to it. A unplanned observation is the sort which you can't (or didn't) write a lookup-table style policy for.

Put another way, if a policy tells you how to map histories of observations to actions, those "histories" are the plannables. However, to select that policy in the first place, over its competitors, you probably had to do some big computation to find some numbers like "expected utility if I prepare a sandwich when I'm in the kitchen but not hungry", or "the influence of my decisions in times of war on the probability of war in the first place", or "the probability [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.