================================================================== Learning Part of the 2011 International Planning Competition Call for Participation http://www.plg.inf.uc3m.es/ipc2011-learning ================================================================== The International Planning Competition (IPC) is a regular event organized in the context of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). IPCs are structured around a number of planning domains such as Logistics, Freecell, and Airport, with each planner being asked to solve a sequence of test problems from each domain. Traditionally, IPC competitor planners address the test problems with domain-independent techniques. Despite the power and elegance of these techniques, pure domain-independent planners are invariably outperformed by planners able to exploit hand-crafted domain-specific knowledge. The motivation for the IPC learning part is to encourage work on planning systems that are able to automatically extract and exploit domain-specific knowledge. The general structure of the learning track will be as follows. The competitors will provide two programs to the organizers before the competition begins: a learner and a planner. The competition will then be run in two stages. First, there will be a learning stage, where the learning programs will be provided with the domain definition and a problem generator for each domain that will appear in the competition. For each domain, the learning program will be given a certain amount of learning time, after which it must output a domain-specific control-knowledge (DCK) file. Second, there will be a planning stage, where, for each domain, the planner will be provided with the appropriate DCK file and asked to solve a sequence of test problems from that domain. The organizers are not placing any constraints on what style of learning approach might be used. For example, a system might utilize statistical/inductive learning or purely deductive learning techniques. In addition, the learning track provides a good venue for entering approaches that might not traditionally be views as learning, such as pure domain-analysis. For example, domain analysis could be conducted during the learning period and the resulting knowledge used during the evaluation period. Ultimately, we hope to see a wide variety of approaches, that will help answer the following questions. How can a planner best use a learning, or domain analysis, period in order to improve future performance? Registration ------------- Potential participants are requested to send an email to sjimenez@inf.uc3m.es with the registration form available from the competition website completed. Early expression of interest will provide opportunity to help shape the structure of the competition. Schedule --------- The tentative schedule of the competition activities are as follows: * May,12 2010: Call for Participation available * May,12 2010: Call for Domains available * Jul,15 2010: Competition Rules available * Oct,30 2010: Resources available * Oct,30 2010: Registration deadline * Nov,15 2010: Domain submission deadline * Jan,10 2011: Planners submission deadline * Feb,16 2011: Papers submission deadline * Mar-May 2011: Collection and evaluation of the results * June 2011: Announcement of the results and winners at ICAPS'11 Possible additional (intermediate) deadlines will be communicated to the registered participants by the organizers. We are looking forward to an exciting competition! Organizers ---------- Sergio Jimenez Celorrio, Amanda Coles, Andrew Coles _______________________________________________ Mailing list ipc2011 learning part http://groups.google.es/group/ipc2011-learning Website ipc2011 learning part http://www.plg.inf.uc3m.es/ipc2011-learning