David Wilkins

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David Edward Wilkins, an American computer scientist and AI researcher at the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center, where he has been since receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1979 under thesis advisor John McCarthy. Using Patterns and Plans to Solve Problems and Control Search covers his chess program Paradise that used knowledge to replace and control search. His further research has centered on planning and reasoning about actions, knowledge representation, and the design and implementation of artificial intelligence systems, including the state of the art AI planner SIPE-2: System for Interactive Planning and Execution.

=AI as Sport= Quote by John McCarthy from AI as Sport  : Besides AI work aimed at tournament play, particular aspects of the game have illuminated the intellectual mechanisms involved. Barbara Liskov demonstrated that what chess books teach about how to win certain endgames is not a program but more like a predicate comparing two positions to see if one is an improvement on the other. Such qualitative comparisons are an important feature of human intelligence and are needed for AI. Donald Michie, Ivan Bratko, Alen Shapiro, David Wilkins, and others have also used chess as a Drosophila to study intelligence. Newborn ignores this work, because it is not oriented to tournament play.

=Selected Publications=

1979

 * David Wilkins (1979). Using Patterns and Plans to Solve Problems and Control Search. Ph.D. thesis, Computer Science Dept, Stanford University, AI Lab Memo AIM-329
 * David Wilkins (1979). Using plans in chess. IJCAI-79

1980 ...

 * David Wilkins (1980). Causality analysis in chess. CSCSI
 * David Wilkins (1980). Using patterns and plans in chess. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 14, pp. 165-203. Reprinted (1988) in Computer Chess Compendium
 * David Wilkins (1981). Using patterns and plans in chess. in Readings in Artificial Intelligence, Tioga Publishin.
 * David Wilkins (1982). Using knowledge to control tree searching. Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 18, pp. 1-51.
 * David Wilkins (1983). Using chess knowledge to reduce search. Chess Skill in Man and Machine, Ch. 10, 2nd edition
 * David Wilkins (1988). Practical Planning: Extending the Classical AI Planning Paradigm. AI Center, SRI International, Morgan Kaufmann Publisher

1990 ...

 * David Wilkins (1991). Working Notes on Paradise Chess Patterns. Technical Note 509, AI Center, SRI International, pdf
 * Robert Levinson, Feng-hsiung Hsu, Tony Marsland, Jonathan Schaeffer, David Wilkins (1991). The Role of Chess in Artificial Intelligence Research. IJCAI 1991, pdf, also in ICCA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 153-161, pdf
 * David Wilkins (1996). That's something I could not allow to happen: HAL and Planning. In HAL's Legacy - 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality edited by David G. Stork

=External Links=
 * David E. Wilkins homepage
 * Official SRI homepage for David E. Wilkins

=References=

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