Inductive Transfer

As an illustration, an application of inductive transfer shows in competitive games involving teams of robots (e.g., Robocup Soccer). In this scenario, transferring knowledge learned from one task into another task is crucial to acquire skills necessary to beat the opponent team. Specifically, imagine a situation where a team of robots has been taught to keep a soccer ball away from the opponent team. To achieve that goal, robots must learn to keep the ball, pass the ball to a close teammate, etc. always trying to remain at a safe distance from the opponents. Now let us assume that we wish to teach the same team of robots to play a different game where they must learn to score against a team of defending robots. Knowledge gained during the first activity can be transferred to the second one. Specifically, a robot can prefer to perform an action learned in the past over actions proposed during the current task because the past action has a significant higher merit value. For example, a robot under the second task may learn to recognize that it is preferable to shoot than to pass the ball because the goal is very close. This action can be learned from the first task by recognizing that the precision of a pass is contingent on the proximity of the teammate.