A short writeup on use of binary decision diagrams (BDDs) in planning

You may want to look at the short write at the following URL to get an idea of how bdds get used in planning.


http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/cse571/bdd-intro.pdf

rao

Setup a wiki page for listing your presentation topic choices

I set up a wikipage accessible from the main 571 wikipage where you can write in your topic choice for reading/presentation.

It is also directly accessible via
 http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Page_for_listing_your_top_two_presentation_topics_from_IJCAI_proceedings

Rao

Tomorrow's class agenda (and the possibility of a make-up class on 9/11)

Folks:

 Tomorrow, we will complete the discussion of section 4.4 (belief-space search), and also cover 4.5 (online search).
If you haven't read section 4.5, please make sure you do.  Time permitting, we will start with Bryce paper. We will come back to it next week.

 We will also try to see if we can schedule a make-up class next week (perhaps on Friday the 11th). This is because I will be missing two classes on the week of 21st as I will be attending ICAPS 2009 in Greece (I know--someone has to do all this hard travel..), and prefer to make them up myself.  So, please come with your Friday 11th calendar.

Rao

New comment on Stochastic vs. Limited Senses.

The following comment sent last semester to 471 folks is relevant given the short philosophical discusson yesterday on this topic.

rao

ps: The full thread is available at  http://cse471-s09.blogspot.com/2009/01/stochastic-vs-limited-senses.html

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Subbarao Kambhampati <noreply-comment@blogger.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 7:42 PM
Subject: [cse471/598 Intro to AI Spring 2009 Blog] New comment on Stochastic vs. Limited Senses.

Jason Majors asks:
 
 =============

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Stochastic vs. Limited Senses

While reading through the book today, I came up with a question. Where's the line between a lack of good senses and a stochastic environment? The examples we've had in class of what makes an environment stochastic (e.g. car trouble with the taxi) could be monitored with an appropriately advanced sensor array. An omniscient agent (or omniscient objective observer) would consider every environment fully deterministic.
So is there a clear line between the two? I would think that something that is beyond practical (such as monitoring the surfaces of a taxi's tires to know when it will weaken enough to burst from the pressure) would be in the stochastic column, but what about not knowing that a tire is going flat, because the taxi lacks a tire pressure monitoring system (which is practical)?

==============


Subbarao Kambhampati has left a new comment on your post "Stochastic vs. Limited Senses":

This is a good question. When we do not have complete models of a world, then what is inherently a "deterministic world" may well look like a non-deterministic/stochastic one to the agent.

About the only "natural" world that can be said to be inherently stochastic is again the quantum world. In every other case, you can--if you prefer--think that the underlying world is deterministic and we just didn't model it adequately. [Even in the quantum case, many scientists--Einstein in particular--fought tooth and nail to convince the scientific community that the uncertainty is *not* inherent and that we get it only because we are not modeling the system completely. See the celebrated EPR paradox--and how it was eventually shown that the "paradox" is really not a paradox and quantum uncertainty is very much inherent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox ]


Notice that the "completeness" we are talking about doesn't have to involve as high a granularity as "modeling the imperfections on the coin surface and the eddies in the room air to predict the coin toss outcome".

Remember that our ancestors, not too long ago, assumed that many phenomena that we now know as deterministic--such as eclipses-- are actually non-deterministic (and thus would associate with them superstitions like "the eclipse shows the gods being angry with the ruler"--as in Chinese belief of "Mandate from the Heaven" etc).



Rao

ps: Of course, we humans are also equally adept at introducing determinism where there is none (e.g. my favorite god created this whole darned entire universe and all its life forms over a weekend some 6000 years ago....

Check out http://www.tv.com/the-simpsons/lisa-the-skeptic/episode/1471/summary.html

where Lisa laments that the expected answer to every question on her science test was "God made it" ;-)



Posted by Subbarao Kambhampati to cse471/598 Intro to AI Spring 2009 Blog at January 27, 2009 6:42 PM

Re: Wikinotes: An experimental feature for the class

On second thoughts, I think it will be useful to have a way of knowing who made what changes to the wikinotes (if nothing else, this can be particpation credit!).

So, you can create yourself an account using the following link

http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/mediawiki/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Special:UserLogin

Then when you edit, login before editing.

Let's see how web3.0 you can get.

thanks
Rao

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 7:56 PM, Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu> wrote:

Folks:

 I installed a mediawiki page for the class so you can collaboratively develop wikinotes for the class. There is a link to the wikinotes from the class page, but it is also available at
http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Cse571

Notice that currently, like wikipedia, anyone can edit pages. If we have software engineering and/or graphics students editing our notes, I will consider installing password permissions.

I assume you all are familiar with wikipedia page editing--mediawiki basically uses the same editor--very easy to use.

I setup a skeletal page for today's lecture and wrote a short summary of the observability issue in classical planning. Others can add anything they particularly remembered/understood.

cheers
Rao

Wikinotes: An experimental feature for the class

Folks:

 I installed a mediawiki page for the class so you can collaboratively develop wikinotes for the class. There is a link to the wikinotes from the class page, but it is also available at
http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/mediawiki/index.php/Cse571

Notice that currently, like wikipedia, anyone can edit pages. If we have software engineering and/or graphics students editing our notes, I will consider installing password permissions.

I assume you all are familiar with wikipedia page editing--mediawiki basically uses the same editor--very easy to use.

I setup a skeletal page for today's lecture and wrote a short summary of the observability issue in classical planning. Others can add anything they particularly remembered/understood.

cheers
Rao

Next reading

Once we are done with "Beyond Classical Search" we will shift to belief-space planning. The paper for that is

http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/dan-jair-pond.pdf

This is a long paper. You should certainly get started on sections 2 and 3.

Rao