Learning-Environment-Design-Heuristic-Brains.md

Heuristic Brain

The Heuristic Brain allows you to hand code an Agent's decision making process. A Heuristic Brain requires an implementation of the Decision script to which it delegates the decision making process.

When you use a Heuristic Brain, you must add a decision script to the Decision property of the Heuristic Brain.

Implementing the Decision interface

When creating your Decision class, extend MonoBehaviour (so you can use the class as a Unity component) and extend the Decision interface.

using UnityEngine;
using MLAgents;

public class HeuristicLogic : Decision
{
    // ...
}

The Decision interface defines two methods, Decide() and MakeMemory().

The Decide() method receives an Agents current state, consisting of the agent's observations, reward, memory and other aspects of the Agent's state, and must return an array containing the action that the Agent should take. The format of the returned action array depends on the Vector Action Space Type. When using a Continuous action space, the action array is just a float array with a length equal to the Vector Action Space Size setting. When using a Discrete action space, the action array is an integer array with the same size as the Branches array. In the discrete action space, the values of the Branches array define the number of discrete values that your Decide() function can return for each branch, which don't need to be consecutive integers.

The MakeMemory() function allows you to pass data forward to the next iteration of an Agent's decision making process. The array you return from MakeMemory() is passed to the Decide() function in the next iteration. You can use the memory to allow the Agent's decision process to take past actions and observations into account when making the current decision. If your heuristic logic does not require memory, just return an empty array.