Nir Lipovetzky takes a new, and very original, look at automated planning: how to reason your way to a plan, instead of searching (blindly or heuristically) for it. First, he has developed a range of novel inference techniques that, combined, produce classical planners that can work with very little backtracking — in many cases none at all — and perform well enough to be awarded at two IPCs. Second, he has invented a novel measure of the hardness of a planning problem, called width, and has shown that by properly exploiting it, a simple blind search can do as well as the best-performing heuristic search planners.
Video available via the link above.