Alex Baranski's Website

My name is Alex Baranski, I'm studying real-time problem-solving and behavioral adaptation as a PhD student at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

I've developed a theory of behavioral search that explains how an agent can solve a problem it's never seen before. The theory relies on a method of constructing an infinite but countable set of goal-oriented behaviors. A behavior is a sequence of subgoals in a continuous state-space that you think you need to reach in order to accomplish your final goal. In thise sense, a behavior is also a hypothesis about how to solve a problem. In priciple, this infinite set contains every behavior: programming a computer, playing baseball, or navigating a maze. The infinite behavior-space is indexed by a cognitive graph, which when incrementally modified in the appropriate way, allows the agent to advance through behavior-space so that any behavior can be tried, if necessary. This guarantees that if a solution to the problem exists, it will eventually be found, as you long as you keep trying different things by enumerating the set. The enumeration (or search) is non-naive in the sense that the history of trials dynamically re-orders the rest of the search. I've written an algorithm for performing this search, and implemented it in a neural network based off of the hippocampus. If you are interested, read more about it here.

If you are interested in my ideas or projects, why not hire me? You can reach out to me.