Technical Report TR-ARP-18-95

Automated Reasoning Project
Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering
and Centre for Information Science Research
Australian National University

November 14, 1995

Generating Random States of Blocks World

John Slaney

Abstract The program BWSTATES generates a random sequence of states of the traditional planning domain Blocks World (BW). These are useful for testing, evaluating and illustrating both action formalisms and implementations of planning systems. Contrary to what might be expected, it is not entirely trivial to generate the states randomly in the sense that every state of the specified size has the same probability of being generated. States generated by BWSTATES have been used in experiments on near-optimal BW planning with up to ten thousand blocks.

BWSTATES is available from ftp://arp.anu.edu.au/pub and comes with sources, Makefile, README, online `man' page and this documentation.