Textbook of AI

1942–, Computer scientist, AI researcher

Also known as: Richard E. Fikes

Richard E. Fikes is an American computer scientist who, with Nils Nilsson at SRI, developed STRIPS (Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver, 1971). STRIPS introduced the precondition–effects representation of operators that has dominated symbolic planning ever since: an operator has a precondition (a set of literals that must hold for it to apply), an add list (literals it makes true) and a delete list (literals it makes false). Plans are sequences of operators that transform an initial state to a goal state.

The STRIPS representation is the foundation of every academic planning system since, including the modern PDDL standard. Fikes later worked on knowledge representation at Xerox PARC and on the Stanford Knowledge Systems Lab, contributing to KRYPTON, Cyc and the Semantic Web infrastructure.