Universal Planning: An (Almost) Universally Bad Idea

To present a sharp criticism of the approach known as universal planning, I begin by giving a precise definition of it. The key idea in this work is that an agent is working to achieve some goal and that to determine what to do next in the pursuit of this goal, the agent finds its current situation in a large table that prescribes the correct action to take. Of course, the action suggested by the table might simply be, "Think about your current situation and decide what to do next." This method is, in many ways, representative of the conventional approach to planning; however, what distinguishes universal plans from conventional plans is that the action suggested by a universal plan is always a primitive one that the agent can execute immediately (Agre and Chapman 1987; Drummond 1988; Kaelbling 1988; Nilsson 1989; Rosenschein and Kaelbling 1986; Schoppers 1987). Several authors have recently suggested that a possible approach to planning in uncertain domains is to analyze all possible situations beforehand and then store information about what to do in each.