Single Photon in Hierarchical Architecture for Physical Decision Making: Photon Intelligence

Abstract

Understanding and using photonic processes for intelligent functionalities, referred to as photonic intelligence, has recently attracted interest from a variety of fields, including postsilicon computing for artificial intelligence and decision making in the behavioral sciences. In a past study, we successfully used the wave–particle duality of single photons to solve the two-armed bandit problem, which constitutes one of the important foundations of decision making and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose and confirm a hierarchical architecture for single-photon-based decision making that verifies the scalability of the principle. Specifically, the four-armed bandit problem is solved given zero prior knowledge in a two-layer hierarchical architecture, where the polarization of single photons is autonomously adapted in order to effect adequate decision making. In the hierarchical structure, the notion of layer-dependent decisions emerges. The optimal solutions in the coarse layer and the fine...