A motivated definition of exploitation and exploration
Bart Naudts, A. Schippers · 1999
This paper can be seen as an exercise in formal reasoning to provide a well-understood, unambiguous definition of the terms exploitation and exploration. It is not our aim to distill a common denominator from the current usage of the two terms in the literature --- we refer to [3] for a detailed overview. Instead, we start from a simple algorithm framework and try to give a precise definition of exploitation and exploration in this context. Then we discuss these definitions in great depth. Population-based algorithms and algorithms with any sort of memory remain out of the scope of this paper, and will be considered in further contributions.