Narrative Planning in Large Domains through State Abstraction and Option Discovery

Abstract

Low-level game environments and other simulations present a difficulty of scale for an expensive AI technique like narrative planning, which is normally constrained to environments with small state spaces. Due to this limitation, the intentional and cooperative behavior of agents guided by this technology cannot be deployed for different systems without significant additional authoring effort. I propose a process for automatically creating models for larger-scale domains such that a narrative planner can be employed in these settings. By generating an abstract domain of an environment while retaining the information needed to produce behavior appropriate to the abstract actions, agents are able to reason in a lower-complexity space and act in the higher-complexity one. This abstraction is accomplished by the development of extended-duration actions and the identification of their preconditions and effects. Together these components may be combined to form a narrative planning domain, and plans from this domain can be executed within the low-level environment.