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Abstract or Additional Information
I shall describe a reformulation (following Hales (2017)) of a 1934 conjecture of Reinhardt on pessimal packings of convex domains in the plane as a problem in optimal control theory. General solutions to the associated control problem and a compactification result are presented. I shall argue that this leads to a program for exhaustive computer search for critical points of the full optimal control problem.
Finally, I will describe a formal proof of convergence (in the proof assistant Coq) of value and policy iteration algorithms in the theory of Markov Decision Processes, which constitute the first results in a program to formalize the basics of optimal control theory.
All are welcome to attend! Please reach out to kov5@pitt.edu for questions.