From etzioni@chum Fri Apr 26 14:38:04 1991
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Date: Fri, 26 Apr 91 14:52:24 -0700
From: etzioni@chum (Oren Etzioni)
Message-Id: <9104262152.AA11478@chum.cs.washington.edu>
To: cs473@chum
Subject: domain.
Status: R

A student asked about
 "a domain that tells the user the best path to take when delivering
pizzas."

I thought I would reply to everyone so that you can see the kind of
considerations that would go into building a good domain.  I will cc
the class on replies to project questions, unless you explicitly ask
me not to.

The Pizza-delivary-path planning domain:
+ manageable problem (but how many operators could you write?)
- equivalent to traveling salesman (unless you bring in a lot of
pizza-specific issues).
- a well-known (minimal spanning tree) algorithm comes within a factor of
2 of optimal on this problem, so it's probably not that interesting
for Prodigy.

So unless you can show that there is interesting structure (ie
interesting operators, interactions, predicates, goals) in this
domain--it's probably not the best choice.  Make sense?

oren

From etzioni@chum Sun Apr 28 15:05:20 1991
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Date: Sun, 28 Apr 91 15:19:56 -0700
From: etzioni@chum (Oren Etzioni)
Message-Id: <9104282219.AA12911@chum.cs.washington.edu>
To: zeno@hardy.u.washington.edu
Cc: cs473@chum
Subject: Planner
Status: R

   Date: Sun, 28 Apr 91 15:11:25 -0700
   From: Sean Lamont <zeno@hardy.u.washington.edu>
   To: etzioni@cs.washington.edu
   Subject: Planner


   ... (My particular area of expertise other than computer
   science is music, which has the distinct problem of having no discreet
   goal state!)

Good point.

   A "planting" planner.  The initial state is a bunch of land and some
   seeds, the goal is whatever you want to grow.  Operators would
   be like harvest, till, plant, etc.  There are some operator dependencies
   involved here, like the fact that if you plant two things in the same
   spot which can grow in the same spot (like tomatoes and garlic, say) and
   harvest one you will have effectively harvested the other.  I'm not sure
   that this is what I wan to do for my final prodigy thing, but I though
   I'd run this by you and see what you thought.

This is a great idea!!!  Looks like you have half of next week's
assignment done already.  To flesh this out more fully for the project
you need to spend a couple hours learning about agriculture to make
sure that what you're doing is realistic.

oren


