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.
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