Leap before you look: information gathering in the PUCCINI planner
Keith Golden · NASA STI Repository (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) · 1998
Most of the work in planning with incomplete information takes a "look before you leap" perspective: Actions must be guaranteed to have their intended effects before they can be executed. We argue that this approach is impossible to follow in many real-world domains. The agent may not have enough information to ensure that an action will have a given effect in advance of executing it. This paper describes puccini, a partialorder planner used to control the Internet Softbot (Etzioni & Weld 1994). puccini takes a different approach to coping with incomplete information: "Leap before you look!" puccini doesn't require actions to be known to have the desired effects before execution. However, it still maintains soundness, by requiring the effects to be verified eventually. We discuss how this is achieved using a simple generalization of causal links. Introduction A boy's appetite grows very fast, and in a few moments the queer, empty feeling had become hunger, and the hu...