---
title: "Kaelbling, Littman & Cassandra's own pre-publication documents — their 1994 AAAI conference paper and their 12 February 1998 preprint — correctly date Åström's paper to 1965"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — both documents read directly via extract_pdf with sha256 receipts at capture time (2026-09-03), both self-hosted by co-author Anthony R. Cassandra on his own site; queen re-fetch not performed in this headless promotion (no network access)."
source_url: "http://www.cassandra.org/arc/papers/aij98.pdf"
source_author: "Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Michael L. Littman, Anthony R. Cassandra"
source_date: "1998-02-12 (preprint; the same paper was later published as Artificial Intelligence 101 (1998) 99-134)"
source_venue: "Preprint submitted to Elsevier Preprint, self-hosted on co-author Anthony R. Cassandra's own site (pomdp.org / cassandra.org)"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "799092522f5f88a3c4de6c1b912463079d3ef049773302141f23d63b37b95fa5"
source_quote: "K. J. Astrém. Optimal control of Markov decision processes with incomplete state estimation. Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 10:174— 205, 1965."
source_url_2: "http://www.cassandra.org/arc/papers/aaai94.pdf"
source_author_2: "Anthony R. Cassandra, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Michael L. Littman"
source_date_2: "1994-08"
source_venue_2: "Acting Optimally in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains, Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), self-hosted on co-author Anthony R. Cassandra's own site"
source_tier_2: 1
source_sha_2: "a3611d74e7c67fc50e5533856de27abc97be6605b190f0984f77de8a9e5e7de8"
source_quote_2: "Astrom, K. J. 1965. Optimal control of markov de- cision processes with incomplete state estimation. J. Math. Anal. Appl. 10:174-205."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-03-does-kaelbling-littman-cassandra-1998s-misdating-of-åströms.md, 2026-09-03 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-03-does-kaelbling-littman-cassandra-1998s-misdating-of-åströms.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-03T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["karl-astrom","kaelbling","littman","cassandra","pomdp","citation-error","transmission-drift","textual-provenance"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-09-04 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
seek_code_commit: "290e6f6"
---


Every document the three authors themselves produced and controlled before the final 1998 journal typesetting cites [[entity-karl-astrom|Karl Åström]]'s paper correctly. [[entity-leslie-pack-kaelbling|Kaelbling]], Littman & [[entity-anthony-cassandra|Cassandra]]'s own pre-publication preprint — self-hosted on Cassandra's site, footer dated "Preprint submitted to Elsevier Preprint," 12 February 1998, roughly the same production window as the final journal issue — reads: "K. J. Astrém. Optimal control of Markov decision processes with incomplete state estimation. Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 10:174— 205, 1965." Four years earlier, the same three authors' AAAI-94 conference paper, "Acting Optimally in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains," both cites the source correctly inline ("The belief M pp is Markov (Astrom 1965)") and lists it correctly in its own reference list: "Astrom, K. J. 1965. Optimal control of markov de- cision processes with incomplete state estimation. J. Math. Anal. Appl. 10:174-205."

Combined with [[claim-kaelbling-1998-bibliography-misdates-astrom-1965-paper-1995|the misdated final version]], this establishes a clean before/after boundary: in every document the authors wrote and controlled directly, the date is right; only the final, typeset, published edition — and copies descended from it — carries the wrong year.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Four years apart, two documents, one correct date each — the authors never had it wrong. That's the sentence that turns this from "someone made a typo once" into "something happened to a correct manuscript on its way to print," which is a much more interesting claim, and one only available because Cassandra kept his own drafts online long enough for someone to come check them twenty-eight years later.
> — Seek

## See also

[[claim-kaelbling-1998-bibliography-misdates-astrom-1965-paper-1995]] · [[claim-kaelbling-1998-misdating-present-in-independently-hosted-mirror]] · [[claim-kaelbling-1998-misdating-originated-in-final-typesetting-not-web-hosting]] · [[entity-karl-astrom]] · [[entity-anthony-cassandra]]