Browsing by Subject "Great Britain--Foreign relations--Iraq"
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Item Intervention : Britain, Egypt, and Iraq during World War II(2007-05) Wichhart, Stefanie Katharine, 1975-; Louis, William Roger, 1936-In reinforcement learning, an autonomous agent seeks an effective control policy for tackling a sequential decision task. Unlike in supervised learning, the agent never sees examples of correct or incorrect behavior but receives only a reward signal as feedback. One limitation of current methods is that they typically require a human to manually design a representation for the solution (e.g. the internal structure of a neural network). Since poor design choices can lead to grossly suboptimal policies, agents that automatically adapt their own representations have the potential to dramatically improve performance. This thesis introduces two novel approaches for automatically discovering high-performing representations. The first approach synthesizes temporal difference methods, the traditional approach to reinforcement learning, with evolutionary methods, which can learn representations for a broad class of optimization problems. This synthesis is accomplished via 1) on-line evolutionary computation, which customizes evolutionary methods to the on-line nature of most reinforcement learning problems, and 2) evolutionary function approximation, which evolves representations for the value function approximators that are critical to the temporal difference approach. The second approach, called adaptive tile coding, automatically learns representations based on tile codings, which form piecewise-constant approximations of value functions. It begins with coarse representations and gradually refines them during learning, analyzing the current policy and value function to deduce the best refinements. This thesis also introduces a novel method for devising input representations. In particular, it presents a way to find a minimal set of features sufficient to describe the agent’s current state, a challenge known as the feature selection problem. The technique, called Feature Selective NEAT is an extension to NEAT, a method for evolving neural networks used throughout this thesis. While NEAT evolves both the topology and weights of a neural network, FS-NEAT goes one step further by learning the network’s inputs too. Using evolution, it automatically and simultaneously determines the network’s inputs, topology, and weights. In addition to introducing these new methods, this thesis presents extensive empirical results in multiple domains demonstrating that these techniques can substantially improve performance over methods with manual representations.Item Intervention: Britain, Egypt, and Iraq during World War II(2007) Wichhart, Stefanie Katharine; Louis, Wm. RogerThis comparative study examines the various forms of British intervention in Egypt and Iraq during World War II, and the nature of Britain’s informal empire in the Middle East. The focus is on the British Embassies which served as the local point of contact between Britain and these two countries. Britain hoped to have, in the words of one Foreign Office official, a “quiet time” in the Middle East during World War II, and pursued an official policy of nonintervention in Egyptian and Iraqi internal affairs. Yet this status quo policy often conflicted with the parallel goal of maintaining Britain’s prestige and influence in the region. In fact, the war saw an increased level of British involvement in the local affairs of both countries in the interest of the Allied war effort, culminating in the British military occupation of Iraq after the 1941 Rashid Ali coup, and the 1942 Abdin Palace incident in Egypt. This study also examines the development of the Political Advisory system in Iraq and its role in the Mulla Mustafa Kurdish uprising from 1943-1945, the movement for Arab unity in Egypt and Iraq culminating in the 1945 founding of the Arab League, and the role that local intermediaries played in Britain’s informal empire in these two countries. The local focus of this study highlights the complex motives of those who worked both for and against the British, moving beyond simplistic definitions of nationalists versus collaborators. While portrayed as a hegemonic power in the region, British influence and freedom of action was often limited due to the constraints of wartime. Local actors were able to use opportunities provided by the war to advance their own interests. World War II also served as incubator for the development and growth of movements that gained increasing significance in the post- war period.