The direct numerical simulations (DNS) for this paper were conducted using Basilisk (http://basilisk.fr/). As Basilisk is a free software program written in C, it can be readily installed on any Linux machine, and it should be straightforward to then run the driver code to re-produce the DNS from this paper. Given this, the numerical solutions presented in this paper are a result of many high-fidelity simulations, which each took approximately 24 CPU hours running between 4 to 8 cores. Hence the difficulty in reproducing the results should mainly be in the amount of computational resources it would take, so HPC resources will be required. The DNS in this paper were used to validate the presented analytical solutions, as well as extend the results to a longer timescale. Reproducing these numerical results will build confidence in these results, ensuring that they are independent of the system architecture they were produced on.
This paper proposes a probabilistic planner that can solve goal-conditional tasks such as complex continuous control problems. The approach reaches state-of-the-art performance when compared to current deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the method relies on an ensemble of deep generative models and is computationally intensive. It would be interesting to reproduce the results presented in this paper on their robotic manipulation and navigation problems as these are very challenging problems that current reinforcement learning methods cannot easily solve (and when they do, they require a significantly larger number of experiences). Can the results be reproduced out-of-the-box with the provided code?
The current code is written in Torch, which is no longer actively maintained. Since deep learning in nanophotonics is an area of active interest (e.g. for the design of new metamaterials), it is important to update the code to use a more modern deep learning library such as tensorflow/keras