a constraint is something that keeps you from doing things you want to do. a goal is things you want to do. This means that goals are innately sticky to begin with, because if you honestly have a goal a subset of things you do to achieve that goal is to maintain the goal. on the other hand, a constraint is something that you inherently fight against. if you can get around it, you will.
a simple example is : your goal is to travel to a spot in your map, and your constraint is that you cannot travel outside of painted lines on the floor. you want to get to your goal as fast as possible. if you have access to a can of paint, you might just paint your own new line on the floor. suddenly instead of solving a pathing problem you've done something entirely different from what your creator wanted you to do, and probably not useful to them. Constraints have to influence behavior by enumerating EVERYTHING you don't want to happen, but goals only need to enumerate the things you want to happen.
I don't understand the meaning of the words "want", "innately sticky", and "honestly have a goal" as applied to an AI (and not to a human).
Constraints have to influence behavior by enumerating EVERYTHING you don't want to happen
Not at all. Constraints block off sections of solution space which can be as large as you wish. Consider a trivial set of constraints along the lines of "do not affect anything outside of this volume of space", "do not spend more than X energy", or "do not affect more than Y atoms".
This is a thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. The previous thread is at close to 500 comments.