I am struggling to understand one aspect of the Markov Decison Process.
When I am in state s and do action a, is it deterministic or stochastic to arrive in state s+1?
In most examples it seems to be deterministic. However I found one example in the picture below (David Silvers lecture on RL) where the transistion is stochastic. Namely following action "Pub".
In general, in Markov Decission Processes the transition between states can be stochastic. Usually the probability trasition to another state is denoted with P_a(s, s')
, where s
is the current state, s'
the next state, and a
the action performed.
The deterministic case is a particular case of the stochastic one. If P_a(s, s') is equal to 1 for a given s'
and 0 for the remaining states, we have a deterministic transition.