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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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A facilitator asks a decision maker questions and obtains responses in order to help the decision maker to select a most powerful alternative. The facilitator must decide what question to ask next and when to terminate the question-response process. We model this problem as a Markov decision process. Conditions are presented that guarantee a finite representation of the cost function and hence the potential computability of an optimal policy for question selection. We also present results helpful in determining when further questioning is unlikely to be useful.
