Representation Edit Distance as a Measure of Novelty

Understand

Adaptation to novelty is viewed as learning to change and augment existing skills to confront unfamiliar situations.

• In this paper, we propose that the amount of editing of an effective representation (the Representation Edit Distance or RED) used in a set of skill programs in an agent's mental model is a measure of difficulty for adaptation to novelty.
• The RED is an intuitive approximation to the change in information content in bit strings measured by comparing pre-novelty and post-novelty skill programs.
• We also present some notional examples of how to use RED for predicting difficulty.