This study examines the effects of age, cognitive resources, and task familiarity on planning performance. Fifty-two young and 52 old adults completed one of two errand-planning tasks. The tasks were matched for structure, difficulty, and format, but differed in content, such that one planning task required planning a real-world shopping tour whereas the other involved planning an unfamiliar sp...

A key characteristic of intelligence is the use of efficient problem-solving strategies when faced with unfamiliar tasks. Enabling machines to do autonomous problem-solving is thus a major milestone on the path to developing intelligent systems. Automated planning is a discipline in artificial intelligence research that studies this topic, specifically the process of automatically computing str...

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is an important, frequently studied research topic in artificial intelligence. Researchers have reported work on its formalisms and applications (Erol, Hendler, & Nau 1994; Smith, Nau, & Erol 1998; Nau et al. 2005). In HTN planning, complex tasks are decomposed into simpler tasks until a sequence of primitive actions is generated. HTN planning is frequen...

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology can have a dramatic impact on the quality of video games. AI planning techniques are useful in a wide range of game components, including modules that control the behavior of fully autonomous units. However, planning is computationally expensive, and the CPU and memory resources available to game AI modules at runtime are scarce. Offline planning can be a...