AUTOMATIC PROBLEM SOLVING’

For intelligent computers to be able to interact with the real world, they must be able to aggregate individual actions into sequences to achieve desired goals. This process is referred to as automatic problem solving, sometimes more casually called automatic planning. The sequences of actions that are generated are called plans. Early work in automatic problem-solving focused on what Newell has called “weak methods ” While these problem-solving strategies are quite general and are formally tractable, they are insufficient in practice for solving problems of any significant complexity. During the last decade, a number of techniques have been developed for improving the efficiency of these strategies. Since these techniques operate within the context of the general strategies, they are termed here problem-solving tactics. The bulk of this paper consists of a description of the problem-solving strategies and a catalogue of tactics for improving their efficiency.This is followed by an attempt to ‘This is a slight revision of a paper presented at the Sixth Internationa