SRI International

Contribution to AI

Ask a robot to push a box off a platform and let it work out the intervening steps itself: that was Shakey's demonstration, built at the Artificial Intelligence Center between 1966 and 1972 and still the standard example of perception, planning and action joined in a single machine. The pieces broke off and outlived the robot. A*, published in 1968 by Hart, Nilsson and Raphael, gave heuristic search a formal guarantee of optimality and became the route-finding method of games, robots and network software alike. STRIPS, from Fikes and Nilsson in 1971, described an action as preconditions plus lists of facts added and deleted — a representation so serviceable that the planning competitions of the 2000s were still running on its descendant, PDDL. PROSPECTOR carried the expert-system idea into mineral exploration and is remembered for flagging a molybdenum deposit in Washington State. The second contribution is a method of transmission. Menlo Park worked out how to push publicly funded research into companies and did it repeatedly: the STAR Laboratory's speech work became Nuance in 1994; the DARPA-funded CALO programme, among the largest artificial intelligence efforts the American government had commissioned, yielded Siri, spun out in 2007 and bought by Apple in 2010. Contract research reaching a phone in millions of pockets is an unusual thing for an institute to be able to point at.

Drafted with AI and edited by hand (claude-opus-5, reviewed 2026-08).