Solving nonogram puzzles by reinforcement learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study solvers of nonogram puzzles, which are good examples of constraint-satisfaction problems. Given an optimal solving module for solving a given line, we compare performance of three algorithmic solvers used to select the order in which to solve lines with a reinforcement-learning-based solver. The reinforcement-learning (RL) solver uses a measure of reduction of distance to goal as a reward. We compare two methods for storing qualities (Q values) of state-action pairs, a lookup table and a connectionist function approximator. We find that RL solvers learn near-optimal solutions that also outperform a heuristic solver based on the explicit, general rules often given to nonogram players. Only RL solvers that use a connectionist function approximator generalize their knowledge to generate good solutions on about half of unseen problems; RL solvers based on lookup tables generalize to none of these untrained problems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".