Planner (programming Language) - Micro-planner Implementation

Micro-planner Implementation

A subset called Micro-Planner was implemented by Gerry Sussman, Eugene Charniak and Terry Winograd and was used in Winograd's natural-language understanding program SHRDLU, Eugene Charniak's story understanding work, Thorne McCarty's work on legal reasoning, and some other projects. This generated a great deal of excitement in the field of AI. It also generated controversy because it proposed an alternative to the logic approach that had been one of the mainstay paradigms for AI.

At SRI International, Jeff Rulifson, Jan Derksen, and Richard Waldinger developed QA4 which built on the constructs in Planner and introduced a context mechanism to provide modularity for expressions in the database. Earl Sacerdoti and Rene Reboh developed QLISP, an extension of QA4 embedded in INTERLISP, providing Planner-like reasoning embedded in a procedural language and developed in its rich programming environment. QLISP was used by Richard Waldinger and Karl Levitt for program verification, by Earl Sacerdoti for planning and execution monitoring, by Jean-Claude Latombe for computer-aided design, by Richard Fikes for deductive retrieval, and by Steven Coles for an early expert system that guided use of an econometric model.

Computers were expensive. They had only a single slow processor and their memories were very small by comparison with today. So Planner adopted some efficiency expedients including the following:

• Backtracking was adopted to economize on the use of time and storage by working on and storing only one possibility at a time in exploring alternatives.
• A unique name assumption was adopted to save space and time by assuming that different names referred to different objects. For example names like Peking and Beijing were assumed to refer to different objects.
• A closed world assumption could be implemented by conditionally testing whether an attempt to prove a goal exhaustively failed. Later this capability was given the misleading name "negation as failure" because for a goal G it was possible to say: "if attempting to achieve G exhaustively fails then assert (Not G)."