Incremental vs. Non-incremental functionality - Can the architecture support both?

[cmaclell]

So Ken brought up the point that AL is not strictly more general than SimStudent I think this is right and the main reason is that AL makes a commitment to incremental learning where as SimStudent uses many non-incremental mechanisms.

I guess this issue is just a question, it is possible to commit to both non-incremental and incremental learning at the architecture level?

For example, to support non-incremental learning we might need to call the learning mechanisms with all the past examples. However, this might force us to commit to maintaining a history of all examples and always providing the learning mechanisms with all the examples-- effectively committing to a non-incremental approach at the architecture level.

Maybe i'm overthinking it and we can easily support both, but just wanted to put this out there.

[eharpste]

A possible middle ground could be the use some of the non-incremental mechanisms that SimStudent used to use but with some kind of memory retrieval model so we don't have the perfect memory problem. I suppose that raises questions around whether the non-incremental processes still work if they aren't guaranteed to get all of the previous examples back.

[eharpste]

Another possibility on this question is we could do the ModularAgent, and the IncrementalModularAgent, where one makes a stronger commitment than the other. It would really help if we could understand the exact process differences between the two.

[eharpste]

This is related to #27 and #26