Agents trained in simulation like this often flail about seemingly randomly, and when they achieve their goals it seems almost accidental. Rather than this being some kind of limitation of the learning algorithm, I think it might be the optimal strategy, and humans would behave that way too if there was no such thing as fatigue or pain. If we want agents to behave more realistically and move with more apparent intent…
Watching my 3-year-old, I suspect humans do behave this way, and without regards to pain or fatigue. He'll hit himself on the head with duplos or bang his head against the wall just to see what happens. The pain is just one more signal for reinforcement learning. I recall a paper in a non-CS journal (psych or neuroscience) that posited that the optimal way to gain large quantities of information about an uncertain en…
Suddenly I recall one author of SICP saying that programming today is about poking at libraries.