Planning and Doing Things

Abstract

I was interested in computers by the age of 15 and gave talks on them at school. I attended evening classes a couple of years later while still at school travelling on the bus for an hour in the evening to a college in Leeds to learn programming (in COBOL!). Computers at that time filled a room, you submitted your exercises on punched card and got the results the following day. I built my first AI planner over 35 years ago. I’d already been on an early AI course at Lancaster University where the language of choice for teaching a range of topics was POP-2 and wanted to do a Summer project to create a problem solver. With support from Donald Michie and his team at Edinburgh I tried to create a Graph Traverser along the lines they were working on. Boy, am I glad I got involved with Computers, AI and planning technology!