Aug
5
Information and Control: Witsenhausen Revisited
What did Witsenhausen’s counterexample really prove about information and control?
The role of information in the context of control is a deep issue. To get at this, we review Witsenhansen’s notions of information patterns for control problems. While staying in that basic framework, we then use ideas from traditional information theory as we re-examine Witsenhausen’s famous “counterexample”. In the process, we construct a family of nonlinear “quantizing” control laws that can perform infinitely better than the best linear policies.
