Creativity is sometimes taken to be an inexplicable aspect of human activity. By summarizing a considerable body of literature on creativity, I hope to show how to turn some of the best ideas about creativity into programs that are demonstrably more creative than any we have seen to date. I believe the key to building more creative programs is to give them the ability to reflect on and modify their own frameworks and criteria. That is, I believe that the key to creativity is at the metalevel.

This article presents the GRT planner, a forward heuristic state-space planner, and comments on the results obtained from the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS'00) planning competition. The grt planner works in two phases. In the preprocessing phase, it estimates the distances between the facts and the goals of the problem. During the search phase, the estimates are used to guide a forward-directed search.

The planning competition has become a regular part of the biennial Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS) conferences. The 2000 competition featured a much larger group of participants and a wide variety of different approaches to planning. Besides the dramatic increase in participation, the 2000 competition demonstrated that planning technology has taken a giant leap forward in performance since 1998. The 2000 competition featured planning systems that were orders of magnitude faster than the planners of just two years prior.

Tokenplan is a planner based on the use of Petri nets. Its main feature is the flexibility it offers in the way it builds the planning graph. The next step is to demonstrate the benefits we expect from our planner in planning problems involving optimization and uncertainty handling.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence presented the 2000 Fall Symposium Series was held on Friday through Sunday, 3 to 5 November, at the Sea Crest Oceanfront Conference Center. The titles of the five symposia were (1) Building Dialogue Systems for Tutorial Applications, (2) Learning How to Do Things, (3) Parallel Cognition for Embodied Agents, (4) Simulating Human Agents, and (5) Socially Intelligent Agents: The Human in the Loop.

We briefly describe the implementation and evaluation of a novel plan synthesis system, called AltAlt. AltAlt is designed to exploit the complementary strengths of two of the currently popular competing approaches for plan generation: (1) graphplan and (2) heuristic state search. It uses the planning graph to derive effective heuristics that are then used to guide heuristic state search. The heuristics derived from the planning graph do a better job of taking the subgoal interactions into account and, as such, are significantly more effective than existing heuristics. AltAlt was implemented on top of two state-of-the-art planning systems: (1) stan3.0, a graphplan-style planner, and (2) hsp-r, a heuristic search planner.

Creativity is sometimes taken to be an inexplicable aspect of human activity. By summarizing a considerable body of literature on creativity, I hope to show how to turn some of the best ideas about creativity into programs that are demonstrably more creative than any we have seen to date. I believe the key to building more creative programs is to give them the ability to reflect on and modify their own frameworks and criteria. That is, I believe that the key to creativity is at the metalevel.

TALplanner is a forward-chaining planner that utilizes domain-dependent knowledge to control search in the state space generated by action invocation. The domain-dependent control knowledge, background knowledge, plans, and goals are all represented using formulas in a temporal logic called tal, which has been developed independently as a formalism for specifying agent narratives and reasoning about them. In the Fifth International Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling Conference planning competition, TALplanner exhibited impressive performance, winning the Outstanding Performance Award in the Domain-Dependent Planning Competition. In this article, we provide an overview of TALplanner

A final chapter overviews the avoid being puzzled by the many confusions, to be a "general textbook of problems and the techniques for

Fast-forward (FF) was the most successful automatic planner in the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS '00) planning systems competition. Like the well-known hsp system, FF relies on forward search in the state space, guided by a heuristic that estimates goal distances by ignoring delete lists. It differs from HSP in a number of important details. This article describes the algorithmic techniques used in FF in comparison to hsp and evaluates their benefits in terms of run-time and solution-length behavior.