A conceptual framework and a heuristic program for the credit-assignment problem

The task of credit assignment is interpreted as the ability of a system to: identify and distinguish strategy components; associated with such components, in different regions of the domain of confrontation, good and poor outcomes of a sequence of actions prescribed by the strategy; improve the boundaries of these regions in minimizing the errors of misclassification of strategy actions; estimate the overall quality of a strategy; and provide information for a metastrategy that shifts the domain of confrontation to those regions in which the strategy studied is most proficient and thereby raises the effective quality of the strategy. The program QO-4, the fourth module of the large system QA (the quasi-optimizer) which can accomplish the above tasks within certain limitations, is described.