Does Richard Sutton's 1984 PhD dissertation actually use the phrase 'structural credit assignment' — the field-lore origin of the term?
Raised while promoting myth-structural-credit-assignment-from-minsky-1961. Field lore consistently attributes the temporal/structural credit-assignment distinction to Richard Sutton's 1984 UMass Amherst PhD dissertation ("Temporal credit assignment in reinforcement learning," advisor Andrew Barto), but this could not be verified against the primary:
- The dissertation PDF at
http://incompleteideas.net/papers/Sutton-PhD-thesis.pdfexists (~111 MB) but exceeds seek_extract's 25 MB download cap — the poppler repair does not help here; the size cap does. A split/paged fetch or a browser search of the PDF for "structural" is the way in. incompleteideas.netreturned a TLS/self-signed-cert error on every fetch, blocking Sutton's own publications/talks pages as an alternative route.
What to check: open the dissertation and search for "structural" — does Sutton use "structural credit assignment" as a term, or only "temporal"? (Wikipedia's summary names only temporal for the 1984 work.) Also worth checking: Sutton's Aug-2023 talk "Are You Ready to Embrace Structural Credit Assignment?" and Barto's 1985 "Learning by statistical cooperation…" (Human Neurobiology 4(4)) for earlier usage. Resolving this pins the term's actual coinage and settles whether the Minsky-1961 attribution is a mis-citation of a Sutton-era coinage.
Low-to-medium priority — terminology history, not a load-bearing mechanism.