Joseph Wilk

We can think of JavaScript running within a clients browser as a robotic agent. It has an environment in which it can sense things. The ability to look at the environment and make decisions based on plans.

So whys that useful, well why is a robot useful? You can produce many different complex plans and give them to the robot and forget about it while it does the work potentially over and over again. If we are really lucky the robot can demonstrate some intelligence and deal with uncertainty.

Well I tried out a small part of this idea to build a server side service which delivered plans in JavaScript to the client. The JavaScript planning agent followed the plans. Its not a intelligent robot but this is just a prototype. The plans where focused on validation conditions that a user needed to get through to post a form.

(more…)

The event calculus planner used within my thesis was based on Dr. Murray Shanahan’s ASLDICN (Abductive SLD with Integrity constraints and proof by Negation) planner with compound action support. This planner is an adaptation from one published in one of Dr. Shanahan’s research papers

http://casbah.ee.ic.ac.uk/%7Empsha/planners.html

The original planner only supports the generation of a single plan. I needed to support conditional planning. I wanted the planner to generate multiple plans representing the different ways of reaching the goal. The problem was how to convert the planner to generate all possible plans. Importantly ensuring that this does not cause infinite looping and no redundant plan solutions are generated.

My version of the planner add the following features:

• Conditional Planning
• Impossible Predicate
• Occured And NotOccured predicates

(more…)