Life After Planning and Reaction

Recent action selection architectures rely on planning, reaction, or both, ignoring the much wider spectrum actually available. This paper recasts the action selection problem in terms of projection, commitment, and abstraction. 1 Introduction The problem of action selection, selecting appropriate actions to perform in a given situation, has received a great deal of attention in AI. Much of the recent discussion about action selection has concerned the distinction between "planning" and "reaction," terms with which few researchers have been entirely happy. While there is broad consensus that planning and reaction are two points on a spectrum rather than opposing sides of a dichotomy, we believe that the use of these terms has encouraged the conflation of other, more basic, distinctions. Furthermore, it has encouraged researchers seeking intermediate points in the planning/reaction spectrum to consider mostly hybrid systems formed by fusing pure planning with pure reaction, rather than..