"Automatic SAT-Compilation of Planning Problems" Paper Review

From: Sandra B Fan (sbfan_at_cs.washington.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 22:05:54 PST

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    Title/Author:
    "Automatic SAT-Compilation of Planning Problems"
    Michael D. Ernest, Todd D. Millstein, and Daniel S. Weld

    Summary:
    In this paper, the authors outline and test several different methods of
    encoding for SAT-compilation.

    Most Important Ideas:
    This paper provides a useful comparison of how different aspects of
    encoding affect performance of the SAT problem. This is important because,
    obviously, we are better able to make decisions about what type of
    encoding to use.

    Secondly, this paper proves that it is possible to automatically compile
    encodings for SAT that are on some level comparable to hand-made
    encodings, even though it doesn't always beat the hand-made ones. This is
    important because it gives us some hope that maybe there's a way
    automatic encodings could, in the future, perhaps completely beat
    hand-made encodings.

    Flaws:
    I'm not sure that this is a flaw, but I would have liked to see some
    description of the types of problems that these various encodings were run
    on and maybe some description of how the type of problem affects the
    results.

    Open Research Questions:
    The authors actually list a large number of interesting future directions.
    It would be interesting to find ways to combine different aspects of the
    different encodings and see how it affects the results, i.e. try "hybrid"
    encodings as mentioned in the paper. Also, another direction could be to
    see whether a compiler can generate domain-specific axioms automatically
    (though I'm sure it's probably been tried since the publication of this
    paper).


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