planner submission deadline extended

[Malte Helmert]

Dear IPC-2008 group,

as we're somewhat late in supplying demo problems and tools, we have
decided to extend the deadline for planner submission to end of May.
The IPC website has been updated accordingly.

We hope to provide a small suite of demo problems for all competition
tracks next week.

Regarding tools, work is underway to extend VAL (http://
planning.cis.strath.ac.uk/VAL/) to the new PDDL 3.1 features. It may
take a while to complete this work; in the meantime, we remind you
that you don't have to support the new PDDL object fluents -- they are
an entirely optional feature of the competition. If you don't intend
to use object fluents, just use the current version 4.2.02 of VAL.

Some people have enquired about PDDL parsers. The VAL suite contains
code for a stand-alone parser as well as code for grounding PDDL
tasks. (Check the alternative installation targets in the Makefile.)
This supports full PDDL 3.0, and will soon be extended to PDDL 3.1.
For people who only enter the sequential track(s) and don't intend to
make use of object fluents, the Metric-FF codebase (http://
members.deri.at/~joergh/metric-ff.html) is another good place to
start. (If you know of other reusable planner implementations, feel
free to post about them!)

Metric-FF is provided under the GNU General Public License. VAL
doesn't officially have a license that allows redistribution yet, but
Derek Long has written to me that it is OK to use it in GPL'ed
projects. (Of course I am not in a position to officially grant such a
permission, so you may still want to contact Derek directly.)

Best regards,

Malte