Meta-Planning: Representing and Using Knowledge About Planning in Problem Solving and Natural Language Understanding†
TL;DR: The central thesis is that much of the knowledge about the planning process itself can be formulated in terms of higher-level goals and plans called meta-goals and meta-plans, which can then be used by the same understanding and planning mechanisms that process ordinary goals and Plans.
About: This article is published in Cognitive Science.The article was published on 1981-07-01 and is currently open access. It has received 121 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Process (engineering).
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TL;DR: Theorems that suggest that efficient general purpose planning with more expressive action representations is impossible are presented, and ways to avoid this problem are suggested.
1,162 citations
TL;DR: Goodnow et al. as discussed by the authors present a review of research on parents' ideas about parenting and development, drawing together research by developmentalists and social psychology on attitudes, schemas, and social categorization.
Abstract: GOODNOW, JACQUELINE J. Parents' Ideas, Actions, and Feelings: Models and Methods from Developmental and Social Psychology. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 59, 286-320. Research on parents' ideas has been described as flourishing but relatively atheoretical, and as in need of closer attention to possible methods. To help meet these problems, this review draws together research by developmentalists on parents' ideas about parenting and development, and research in social psychology on attitudes, schemas, and social categorization. The review notes first the presence of a common topic-"social cognition"-and some common features to the history of research by developmental and social psychologists on that topic. It proceeds to outline developmental and social approaches to common issues: the likelihood of change vs. perseverance in ideas; the sources of ideas (constructions from individual experience vs. cultural scripts); links between ideas and actions; links between ideas and feelings; and the impact of one generation's ideas upon the development of the next. For each of these issues, the aim is to demonstrate how models and methods in social psychology can be used to benefit research on parents' ideas. For research on parents, the general argument is that the critical steps in any analysis of ideas and their interactions with actions, feelings, or outcomes are the explicit statement and development of hypotheses and the search for promising methods to accompany them. For developmental psychology in general, the review is offered as an example of the benefits to drawing from fields such as social psychology, and as a filtered introduction to some relevant but often unfamiliar material.
426 citations
TL;DR: UC as mentioned in this paper is a natural language help facility for the UNIX operating system, which is comprised of a language analyzer and generator, a context and memory model, an experimental common-sense planner, highly extensible knowledge bases on both UNIX domain and the English language, a goal analysis component, and a system for acquisition of new knowledge through instruction in English.
Abstract: UC is a natural language help facility which advises users in using the UNIX operating system. Users can query UC about how to do things, command names and formats, online definitions of UNIX or general operating systems terminology, and debugging problems in using commands. UC is comprised of the following components: a language analyzer and generator, a context and memory model, an experimental common-sense planner, highly extensible knowledge bases on both the UNIX domain and the English language, a goal analysis component, and a system for acquisition of new knowledge through instruction in English. The language interface of UC is based on a “phrasal analysis” approach which integrates semantic, grammatical and other types of information. In addition, it includes capabilities for ellipsis resolution and reference disambiguation.
366 citations
TL;DR: The various approaches that have been taken to plan inference are described, along with techniques for dealing with ambiguity, robustness, and representation of requisite domain knowledge, and areas for further research are discussed.
Abstract: Knowing a user's plans and goals can significantly improve the effectiveness of an interactive system. However, recognizing such goals and the user's intended plan for achieving them is not an easy task. Although much research has dealt with representing the knowledge necessary for plan inference and developing strategies that hypothesize the user's evolving plans, a number of serious problems still impede the use of plan recognition in large-scale, real-world applications. This paper describes the various approaches that have been taken to plan inference, along with techniques for dealing with ambiguity, robustness, and representation of requisite domain knowledge, and discusses areas for further research.
298 citations
Additional excerpts
...Wilensky (1981, 1983) was the ¢rst to address the importance of non-domain goals in plan inference....
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229 citations
References
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Book•
01 Jun 1972TL;DR: The aim of the book is to advance the understanding of how humans think by putting forth a theory of human problem solving, along with a body of empirical evidence that permits assessment of the theory.
Abstract: : The aim of the book is to advance the understanding of how humans think. It seeks to do so by putting forth a theory of human problem solving, along with a body of empirical evidence that permits assessment of the theory. (Author)
10,770 citations
"Meta-Planning: Representing and Usi..." refers background in this paper
...…varies considerably, involving for example, robots finding their way through rooms (Fikes and Nilsson 1971, Sacerdoti 1974), "missionary and cannibals" type problems (Newell and Simon 1972), electronic circuit design (McDermott 1977) and program construction (Rich and Shrobe 1976, Barstow 1977)....
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...The domain over which plan construction is performed varies considerably, involving for example, robots finding their way through rooms (Fikes and Nilsson 1971, Sacerdoti 1974), "missionary and cannibals" type problems (Newell and Simon 1972), electronic circuit design (McDermott 1977) and program construction (Rich and Shrobe 1976, Barstow 1977)....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the problem of reasoning about whether a strategy will achieve a goal in a deterministic world and present a method to construct a sentence of first-order logic which will be true in all models of certain axioms if and only if a certain strategy can achieve a certain goal.
Abstract: A computer program capable of acting intelligently in the world must have a general representation of the world in terms of which its inputs are interpreted. Designing such a program requires commitments about what knowledge is and how it is obtained. Thus, some of the major traditional problems of philosophy arise in artificial intelligence. More specifically, we want a computer program that decides what to do by inferring in a formal language that a certain strategy will achieve its assigned goal. This requires formalizing concepts of causality, ability, and knowledge. Such formalisms are also considered in philosophical logic. The first part of the paper begins with a philosophical point of view that seems to arise naturally once we take seriously the idea of actually making an intelligent machine. We go on to the notions of metaphysically and epistemo-logically adequate representations of the world and then to an explanation of can, causes, and knows in terms of a representation of the world by a system of interacting automata. A proposed resolution of the problem of freewill in a deterministic universe and of counterfactual conditional sentences is presented. The second part is mainly concerned with formalisms within which it can be proved that a strategy will achieve a goal. Concepts of situation, fluent, future operator, action, strategy, result of a strategy and knowledge are formalized. A method is given of constructing a sentence of first-order logic which will be true in all models of certain axioms if and only if a certain strategy will achieve a certain goal. The formalism of this paper represents an advance over McCarthy (1963) and Green (1969) in that it permits proof of the correctness of strategies that contain loops and strategies that involve the acquisition of knowledge; and it is also somewhat more concise. The third part discusses open problems in extending the formalism of part 2. The fourth part is a review of work in philosophical logic in relation to problems of artificial intelligence and a discussion of previous efforts to program ‘general intelligence’ from the point of view of this paper.
3,588 citations
3,431 citations
Book•
31 Oct 1995
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe a problem solver called STRIPS that attempts to find a sequence of operators in a spcce of world models to transform a given initial world model into a model in which a given goal formula can be proven to be true.
Abstract: We describe a new problem solver called STRIPS that attempts to find a sequence of operators in a spcce of world models to transform a given initial world model into a model in which a given goal formula can be proven to be true. STRIPS represents a world n,~del as an arbitrary collection of first-order predicate calculus formulas and is designed to work with .models consisting of large numbers of formulas. It employs a resolution theorem prover to answer questions of particular models and uses means-ends analysis to guide it to the desired goal-satisfying model.
1,793 citations