This generates uniformly distributed random blocks world states (in pairs) suitable for experimentation with planning systems.
If problems are all you need, only the states need be printed out. However, it may be useful to generate solutions rather than just the states, so we have provided an option to select a solver. Optimal solutions may be especially useful for comparison with the solutions produced by planners. Note however that the optimal BW planning problem is NP-hard (that's not our fault!) so the optimal solver may time out if you try to run it on really large instances.
The option to print both the states and the plan length is especially useful for obtaining the optimal plan length for purposes of evaluating the plans produced by other systems.
If you request states only, you may choose between the plain format defined in the bwstates manual and a PDDL format which many planning systems prefer. The domain "blocksworld" is assumed to be some straightforward version without hands and with "on-table" as a predicate rather than "Table" as the name of an object. Massaging the PDDL text to fit other variants of the domain should be trivial. Please note that if you request output from a solver, rather than just the states, the PDDL option has no effect.
If you don't want randomly generated states but just solutions to your own problems, you should try this page instead.
Note: If you report experiments using this page, please note that the correct citation is the paper:
John Slaney and Sylvie Thiébauxin which the generator and associated theory are fully described.
Blocks World revisited
Artificial Intelligence 125 (2001): 119-153.
For more of our thoughts about BW, follow the links on this page .