Optimal planning: Interview with Álvaro Torralba – #AAAI2022 award winner

To the right, search space, where all states with the same initial-state distance (g) and estimated goal distance (h) are represented by a single binary decision diagram (to the left), and only those whose g h solution cost need to be considered. Daniel Fišer, Álvaro Torralba and Joerg Hoffmann won an outstanding paper runners-up award at AAAI 2022 for their paper Operator-potential heuristics for symbolic search. Here, Álvaro tells us more about the field of optical planning, their methodology, and how potential heuristics can be used in symbolic search with very positive results. At a very general level, the research is on automated planning. This is a sub-area of AI where we try to answer the question: what is the best way to act given our knowledge of the world?