When I first drove the Tesla Model 3 in March 2018, I attracted so much attention from the denizens of Los Angeles that it bordered on embarrassing. The hoi polloi of Beverly Hills walked right by Lamborghinis and Aston Martins to ogle the Tesla. They even wandered into traffic to get a closer look at Elon Musk's new, more affordable, supposedly mainstream sedan. Nine months later, Angelenos have returned to their car-jaded selves. You can't spend five minutes in LA without spotting a Model 3.

In this paper, we discuss a computational approach to the cognitivetask of social planning. First, we specify a class of planningproblems that involve an agent who attempts to achieve its goalsby altering other agents' mental states. Next, we describe SFPS,a flexible problem solver that generates social plans of this sort,including ones that include deception and reasoning about otheragents' beliefs. We report the results for experiments on socialscenarios that involve different levels of sophistication and thatdemonstrate both SFPS's capabilities and the sources of its power.Finally, we discuss how our approach to social planning has beeninformed by earlier work in the area and propose directions foradditional research on the topic.