Generalized best-first search strategies and the optimality of A (original) (raw)

1985, Journal of The ACM - JACM

This paper reports several properties of heuristic best-first search strategies whose scoring functions ƒ depend on all the information available from each candidate path, not merely on the current cost g and the estimated completion cost h. It is shown that several known properties of A* retain their form (with the minmax of f playing the role of the optimal cost), which helps establish general tests of admissibility and general conditions for node expansion for these strategies. On the basis of this framework the computational optimality of A*, in the sense of never expanding a node that can be skipped by some other algorithm having access to the same heuristic information that A* uses, is examined. A hierarchy of four optimality types is defined and three classes of algorithms and four domains of problem instances are considered. Computational performances relative to these algorithms and domains are appraised. For each class-domain combination, we then identify the strongest typ...

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