TrustPOMDP
Last edited: August 8, 2025Humans either over-rely (drive a Tesla while sleeping) or under rely (interfering) with robot’s actions.
- human and robot interactions may depend on entire history
- trust is a proxy for the full interaction history
- the human’s policy must be modeled by th robot
- trust is demonstrated through real-world experimentation
Formulation
Add two variable
- Trust: \(\theta_{t}\), the robot’s ability to succeed in a task
- Performance: \(e_{t+1}\), success or failure in attempting a task
the trust model probabilities for model’s correct modeling of humans are low: high variance between participants.
Tuning Fork
Last edited: August 8, 2025Tuning Forks (funing torks!) is a Tuning Fork. You smack it and it goes “biiing!”

Let’s figure out how it works. For us to be one same page, let’s define some vocab:
Vocab
- “Tine”: one of the two prongs of the fork
A Cursory Explanation
Source: here and here. Both are not very scientific but a good first step.
From a very basic perspective, hiting a tuning fork creates a transverse wave on the tine you hit, which vibrates and then compresses the air around it in a longitudinal fashion at a set frequency, which we hear as a sound.
turing machine
Last edited: August 8, 2025constituents
- \(Q\) is a finite set of states
- \(\Sigma\) is the input alphabet, where \(\square \not \in \Sigma\)
- \(\Gamma\) is the tape alphabet, where \(\square \in \Gamma\), and \(\Sigma \subseteq \Gamma\) (because we can write empty cells)
- \(\delta: Q \times \Gamma \to Q \times \Gamma \times \qty {L, R}\)
- \(q_0 \in Q\), the start state
- \(q_{a} \in Q\), the accept state
- \(q_{r} \neq q_{a}\in Q\), the reject state (because a Turing Machine may not terminate at end of input)
requirements
additional information
why TM is awesome
- a Turing Machine \(M = \qty(\Gamma, Q, S)\) should be ready for inputs of any length \(n\) (in particular, when designing \(M\), we don’t know what \(n\) will be)
- a Turing machine’s computation is “local”—you can’t look at the whole input, and the composition of these many local steps
- No ambiguity as to runtime: how many times you apply \(\delta\) before you get to Qaccept or Qreject
Church-Turing thesis as local steps
“computation is any process that takes place in a sequence of simple, local steps.”
turing machine (overview)
Last edited: August 8, 2025turing machine is a computational system that has a memory tape, and can go through the input multiple times; they don’t have to accept or reject states, turing machines can run forever and can have loops.
For the main topic, see turing machine
decidable vs. recognizable languages
- there are not enough Turing Machines to compute every language (so there are non-recognizable/non-decidable languages)
- halting problem and ATM, meaning strings where Turing Machines can’t decide them
- “the diagonalization argument”
- mapping reduction
- Rice’s Theorem
- strong reduction: higher achy of hard problems
self-reference
- turing Machines can view and produce its own code.
- foundations of mathematics can be shown using these systems
Kolomogorov Complexity
Two Statements About Uniformity
Last edited: August 8, 2025\(\text{BPP} \subseteq p / poly\)
Remember the advice-taking TM formulation of circuits.
Now, a language \(L \in \text{BPP}\) if \(\exists\) a polytime TM \(M\) such that:
- \(x \in L\) implies \(P\qty [M\qty(x, v) \text{ accepts}] \geq \frac{2}{3}\)
- \(x \not\in L\) implies \(P\qty [M\qty(x, v) \text{rejects}] \geq \frac{2}{3}\)
Intuition: we want to use \(r\) as advice. But, we need a “random” advice for each \(x\) which we don’t have. But; consider the following parameterization of BPP: we notice that if we have \(\frac{1}{3}\) chance of “bad” advice, we know that we can bump the failure down by trying a more, trending towards \(2^{-O\qty(k)}\). Using \(O\qty(k)\), by the union bound, we know at least one advice is good for all input \(x\).
