Scientific Articles and Reports

• AWL – Ant War Language (Syntax and Semantics report) (GZipped PostScript)
• Creating a Game Framework using Java 2 Enterprise Edition (Distributed Systems report) (GZipped PostScript)
• Shredding and Querying XML Data Using an RDBMS (Databases article) (GZipped PostScript)
  Abstract: This article addresses the problems of querying and retrieving XML data stored in a relational database. We discuss insertion of differently structured XML documents into a database with a constant relational schema by using a somple and general shredding strategy. Closely related to this, and discussed in this article as well, is round-tripping which allows us to return all or a fragment of the data in XML format. We also consider querying the relational data using XML Path Language and XML Query Language. Furthermore, we detail an implementation of XPath axis steps as SQL statements, and outline an approach for implementing the central FLWOR construct in the XQuery language.
• Applying Relational Reinforcement Learning to Multi-Agent Environments (Machine Learning report) (GZipped PostScript)
  Abstract: This report documents an investigation into the viability of relational reinforcement learning when faced with non-deterministic multiagent environments. In such environments, both the non-determinism introduced by the roll of the dice, and non-determinism introduced by the presence of other agents exist. To conduct the investigation, a toolbox for generating transition examples and inducing logical decision trees is described and implemented. The toolbox is used to conduct experiments on both single- and multi-agent environments, thereby illustrating the principle difference of the two. It is shown that learning a reasonable policy in multi-agent environments is difficult when using relational reinforcement learning.
  The two main examples used throughout the report are the well known Blocks World as well as a simplified version of the board game Risk from Hasbro.

Articles and reports are also available through the electronic library system at the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University.