Comment by curiouskiwicat on Understanding and controlling a maze-solving policy network · 2023-05-01T03:07:22.731Z · LW · GW

Looking at the four predictors in the logistic regression I thought (4) was conceptually reciprocal to (2). i.e., 

In (2) The farther the agent has to walk to the cheese, the less likely it is to do so. 

Intuitively I expected--for the same reason--that in (4) the farther the agent has to walk to the top-right 5x5, the less likely it is to do _that_, and therefore, conversely, the more likely it is to go for the cheese. 

You've called the effect in (2) "obvious"; I don't know about you, but to me it seems it's obvious because there's some kind of least-effort/efficiency emergent effect, perhaps just driven by the number of steps the agent has to take, where the more effort to get a goal (cheese or top right 5x5) the less likely the agent is to get there. And that would apply to (4) as well.