4TH INTERNATIONAL PLANNING COMPETITION CLASSICAL PART FINAL CALL FORPARTICIPATION

[Richard T Goodwin <rgoodwin@us.ibm.com>]

Apologies if you receive this multiple times.

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              4TH INTERNATIONAL PLANNING COMPETITION
                                     CLASSICAL PART
                       FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
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Dear colleagues,

we would like to invite you to participate in the classical part of the
4th international planning competition. This is the continuation of the
competitions held previously alongside AIPS-1998, AIPS-2000, and
AIPS-2002. Planner registration deadline is 27 January 2004. To
register, simply write mail to hoffmann@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
and/or stefan.edelkamp@cs.uni-dortmund.de

We emphasize that participation is possible and makes sense even if your
planner handles only a small subset of the competition language PDDL2.2.
In particular, we provide compiled versions of any domains using one of
the two new language features. We have also made a serious effort to
make even the STRIPS benchmarks an interesting challenge, and good
performance on these will be honoured. Generally, we will lay less
stress on language coverage than was done at IPC-3.

We especially wish to encourage optimal planners to participate. By
"optimal", we mean any planner (such as Graphplan, eg.) that gives a
guarantee on the quality of the returned plan, no matter what definition
of "quality" is used. Such planners will be evaluated separately from
the sub-optimal planners (such as LPG, eg.) that give no guarantee on
plan quality. We intend to present an award to the best optimal planner
in the competition.

Further details are on the competition are available at:
http://ipc.icaps-conference.org/

Looking forward to your participation,
Joerg Hoffmann and Stefan Edelkamp