Your comments on what got overplayed/underplayed

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@parichaalak.eas.asu.edu>]

Most people gave thoughtful comments on what got overplayed and what
was missed in the course.  Here are some of the common themes and my
responses/apologies: 

"IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PLANNING & LEARNING, BUT WE BARELY DID ANY
LEARNING"

That is true, but I sort of told you that this is going to be the
case. If you look at the very first slide of the very first lecture,
it makes that qualification. The name is a historical accident. It
really should be just called automated planning.

"SHOULD HAVE DONE MORE NON-CLASSICAL PLANNING STUFF"

Most people felt that somehow we should have squeezed out some of the
earlier stuff and put in more of the later stuff. I sort of see the
point (although, to some extent this is the natural reaction in any
course).

Part of this is probably a reflection on my initial bias that I should
probably go into more detail about the parts that we know how to do
well, before getting into the other parts. The other part is I wasn't
really sure of the background of the people, and in a 9-people class,
losing even 4 people makes the classes quite a bit of drag. 

Ideally, it would be good to do a more "seminar" oriented class after
this class--to discuss the non-classical planning topics. I am
thinking of running a reading group on planning in fall, and if I do,
I will certainly keep you posted (so you can join if interested). 


"THE PROJECTS INVOLVED MORE OF GRUNGE WORK RUNNING EXISTING
PLANNERS. SHOULD HAVE HAD SEMESTER-LONG INDIVIDUAL PROJECT"

I asked the class at the beginning of the semester whether they want
individual semester projects or homogenous ones we set up, and there
was pretty much a strong majority in favor of homogenous
ones. Clearly, runnig someone else's planner with a bunch of domains
is not as interesting as doing some neat extensions yourselves--depth
and creativity-wise. In the past I had pretty much always gone with
single semester long projects. The RePOP project, for example, started
out as a semester project in a previous offering of this course, and
if I had a choice, I would love to try that everytime. However, my
general experience has been that semester-long individual projects
tend to vary all over the spectrum, and depend a lot on the background
of the students taking the course.

Oh well--enough of rationalizing.. ;-)

Thanks again for all the comments. I will have them typed and put up. 

Rao
[May 16, 2003]