, planetary rover exploration and spacecraft control domains. Other temporal and resource-intensive domains including logistics planning, plant control and manufacturing have also helped to focus the community on the modelling and reasoning issues that must be confronted to make planning technology meet

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This paper considers the support of real-time applications in an

Planning under uncertainty is a central problem in the study of automated sequential decision making, and has been addressed by researchers in many different fields, including AI planning, decision analysis, operations research, control theory and economics. While the assumptions and perspectives adopted in these areas often differ in substantial ways, many planning problems of interest to researchers in these fields can be modeled as Markov decision processes (MDPs) and analyzed using the techniques of decision theory. This paper presents an overview and synthesis of MDP-related methods, showing how they provide a unifying framework for modeling many classes of planning problems studied in AI. It also describes structural properties of MDPs that, when exhibited by particular classes of problems, can be exploited in the construction of optimal or approximately optimal policies or plans. Planning problems commonly possess structure in the reward and value functions used to de...

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El Salvador, Guatemala is a, study in black and white. On the left is a collection of extreme Marxist-Leninist groups led by what one diplomat calls “a pretty faceless bunch of people.’ ’ On the right is an entrenched elite that has dominated Central America’s most populous country since a CIA-backed coup deposed the reformist government of Col. Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954. Moderates of the political center. embattled but alive in E1 Salvador, have virtually disappeared in Guatemala-joining more than 30.000 victims of terror over the last tifteen vears. “The situation in Guatemala is much more serious than in EI Salvador, ” declares one Latin American diplomat. “The oligarchy is that much more reactionary. and the choices are far fewer. “ ‘Zero’: The Guatemalan oligarchs hated Jimmy Carter for cutting off U.S. military aid in 1977 to protest human-rights abuses-and the right-wingers hired marimba bands and set off firecrackers on the night Ronald Reagan was elected. They considered Reagan an ideological kinsman and believed they had a special

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The theoretical framework presented in this article explains expert performance as the end result of individuals ' prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints. In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning. Our civilization has always recognized exceptional individuals, whose performance in sports, the arts, and science is vastly superior to that of the rest of the population. Speculations on the causes of these individuals ' extraordinary abilities and performance are as old as the first records of their achievements. Early accounts commonly attribute these individuals' outstanding performance to divine intervention, such as the

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to reading are (a) the characteristics of eye movements, (b) the perceptual span, (c) integration of information across saccades, (d) eye movement control, and (e) individual differences (including dyslexia). Similar topics are discussed with respect to the other tasks examined. The basic theme of the review