LANSKY@SRI-AI.ARPA (03/06/86)
SITUATION CALCULUS PLANNING IN BLOCKS AND RELATED WORLDS John McCarthy (JMC@SU-AI) Stanford University 11:00 AM, MONDAY, March 10 SRI International, Building E, Room EJ228 (new conference room) This talk will present mainly ideas rather than completed work. Situation calculus is based on the equation s' = result(e,s), where s and s' are situations and e is an event. Provided one can control the deduction adequately, this is a more powerful formalism than STRIPS. Planning a sequence of actions, or more generally, a strategy of actions to achieve a situation with specified properties, admits a variety of heuristics which whittle away at the problem. In many practical situations, these heuristics, which don't guarantee a full solution but leave a reduced problem, are sufficient. Humans appear to use many of them and so should computer programs. The talk therefore will concern both epistemological and heuristic aspects of planning problems. -------