Classic Paper Award

David McAllester and David Rosenblitt's paper, "Systematic Nonlinear Planning" (published in the Proceedings of the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence [AAAI-91]), won the AAAI-10 classic paper award. This commentary by Daniel S. Weld describes the two major impacts the paper had on the field of automated planning. Initially, researchers made many simplifying assumptions, defining the classical planning problem: produce a sequence of atomic actions that will achieve a logically specified goal in a completely known world where action effects are certain. David McAllester and David Rosenblitt's paper, "Systematic Nonlinear Planning" (McAllester and Rosenblitt 1991), presented 19 years ago at the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-91), had two major impacts on the field: (1) an elegant algorithm and (2) endorsement of the lifting technique. The paper's biggest impact stems from its extremely clear and simple presentation of a sound and complete algorithm (known as SNLP or POP) for classical planning.