Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!gatech!bloom-beacon!husc6!cmcl2!phri!bc-cis!pluto!dasys1!hoptoad!ptsfa!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!decvax!decwrl!labrea!glacier!jbn
From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Definition of science and of scientific method.
Message-ID: <17133@glacier.STANFORD.EDU.R>
Date: Fri, 17-Jul-87 14:31:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: glacier.17133
Posted: Fri Jul 17 14:31:10 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Jul-87 06:35:18 EDT
References: <6693@allegra.UUCP> <1664@tekcrl.TEK.COM> <1084@aecom.YU.EDU> <813@klipper.cs.vu.nl>
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 19
Summary: Research in planning seems to behave like a science


     In "Planning for Conjunctive Goals" (Artificial Intelligence, vol 32, 1987,
p. 333-377), David Chapman, while discussing the history of conjunctive planning
research, writes

	"The three main points of this section are that in retrospect all
	domain-independent conjunctive planners work the same way; that the
	action representation which they depend on is inadequate for real-world
	planning, and that desirable extension to this action representation
	make planning exponentially harder.  It is much longer than such
	sections are in typical AI papers because domain-independent 
	conjunction planning is unusual as a subfield of AI in showing a
	clear line of researchers duplicating and building on each other's
	work.  Science is supposed to be like that, but for the most part
	AI hasn't been."

I agree.

						John Nagle