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In 1998, the international planning community was invited to take part in the first planning competition, hosted by the Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems Conference, to provide a new impetus for empirical evaluation and direct comparison of automatic domain-independent planning systems. This article describes the systems that competed in the event, examines the results, and considers some of the implications for the future of the field. Competitors were invited to come and compete on a collection of domains and associated problems, sight unseen, using whatever planning technology they wanted. (Anderson and Weld 1998). Another important problem was anticipating the demands of the competition domains.