Solving Non-Markovian Control Tasks with Neuro-Evolution

The success of evolutionary methods on standard control learning tasks has created a need for new benchmarks. The classic pole balancing problem is no longer difficult enough to serve as a viable yardstick for measuring the learning efficiency of these systems. The double pole case, where two poles connected to the cart must be balanced simultaneously is much more difficult, especially when velocity information is not available. In this article, we demonstrate a neuroevolution system, Enforced Sub-populations (ESP), that is used to evolve a controller for the standard double pole task and a much harder, non-Markovian version. In both cases, our results show that ESP is faster than other neuroevolution methods. In addition, we introduce an incremental method that evolves on a sequence of tasks, and utilizes a local search technique (Delta-Coding) to sustain diversity. This method enables the system to solve even more difficult versions of the task where direct evolution cannot.