Search and Planning Under Incomplete Information

The Distinguished Dissertation series is published on behalf of the Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing and the British Computer Society, who annually select the best British PhD dissertations in computer science for publication. The dissertations are selected on behalf of the CPHC by a panel of eight academics. Each dissertation chosen makes a noteworthy contribution to the subject and reaches a high standard of exposition, placing all results clearly in the context of computer science as a whole. This book examines how to play and solve incomplete information games. Starting by giving a meaning to the idea of est defence it clarifies the problems that incomplete information poses to standard search algorithms, and describes alternative algori thms that fare better. It also introduces planning techniques that can cope with incomplete information by extending the classical plan-space planning paradigm. ''
TOC: Introduction.- A good deal of Bridge literature.- Planning literature.- The Bridge search space size.- Proof-planning: solving independent goals using tactics and methods.- Search in games with incomplete information-. Identifying the best strategy: tackling non-locality.- Interleaving plans with dependencies.- Re-introducing neglected actions.- Overall architecture.- Results.- Conclusions.- An overview of commercial computer Bridge systems.- Generating explanations.- Further examples.- User manual.- Code.-