Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

State Space Search

Gregory Adam
 Contents
• Intro
• Theory
– State Space Search
• Blind State Space Search ( 3 algorithms)
• Heuristic State Space Search ( 2 algorithms)
• Example

Most of the material used ( except the examples) comes from

“The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence – Volume I”
(Avron Barr & Edward A Feigenbaum)

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 2

 What
• Part of Computer Science concerned with
designing intelligent computer systems
• Systems exibiting the characteristics we
associate with intelligence in human
behaviour

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 3

 Areas
• The areas are not distinct – most are interrelated
• Problem Solving
– Puzzles
– Play games, eg chess
– Symbolic integration of mathematical formulas
– Some programs can improve their performance with experience
• Logical reasoning
– Prove assertions (theorems) by manipulating a database of facts
• Language
– Understanding of natural language
– Translation
– Eg Spelling checker
• Programming
– Write computer programs based on a description

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 4

 Areas – cont’d
• Learning
– Learning from examples
• Expertise (aka Expert Systems)
– User interacts with an Expert System via a dialogue
– Expert feeds knowledge
• Robotics and vision
– Manipulate robot devices (mostly in industrial applications to perform
repetitive tasks)
– Recognize objects and shadows in visual scenes
• Systems and languages
– Time-sharing, list processing, and interactive debugging were
developed in the AI research

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 Search
• Components of search systems
– Database : describes the current task domain and the goal
– Set of operators: transform one state to another
– Eg in the 8 puzzle: UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT
– Control strategy : decides what to do next
• Definition
– Find a finite sequence of operators transforming the initial state to a
goal state
• Reasoning
– Forward : Transform original state to a goal state
– Backward: Transform a goal state to the original state

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 Search
• State Space and Problem Reduction
– State space
• An operator produces exactly one new state
– Problem reduction
• An operator produces a set of subproblems, each of which have to be solved
• Eg
– Tower of Hanoi
– Integrate (f(x) + g(x)) dx
» Integrate f(x) dx
» Integrate g(x) dx
» Add the results

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 Search - problem representation
• State Space: State space graph

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 Search - problem representation
• AND/OR Graph
– Horizontally connected edges (here marked in red)
represent AND nodes
– For AND nodes, each of the nodes have to be
solved
– Eg
• problem reduction
• Games (eg chess)

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 Search – Blind Search
• The Blind search algorithms following
• Breadth First Search
• Depth First Search
• Uniform Cost Search
– Assume the State Space graph is a Directed Tree
• The Heuristic search algorithms following
• Ordered Search
• A* An optimal search for an optimal solution
– Assume the State Space graph is a General Graph

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 Search
• General graph consists of
– Nodes or points
– Arcs or edges connecting two nodes

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 Search
• Arcs can be
– Undirected

or

– Directed

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 Search
• Undirected graph
– Contains only undirected arcs
• Directed graph or digraph
– Contains only directed arcs
• Mixed graph
– Contains both directed and undirected arcs

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 Search
• In a directed graph (containing only directed arcs)
• The indegree of a node
– Is the number of arcs terminating in that node
• The outdegree of a node
– Is the number of arcs starting in that node

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 Search
• A Directed tree
– Is an acyclic digraph
• Which has one node called the root
– The root node has indegree zero, and
• All other nodes have indegree one

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Breadth-First Search
• Expands nodes in their proximity from the
root (or start) node
• Expands all nodes of depth n before
expanding nodes of depth n+1
• Guaranteed to find the shortest possible
solution

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Search – Blind State Space Search
Breadth-First Search

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Breadth-First Search - Algorithm
1. Put the start node on a list, called OPEN, of unexpanded
nodes
2. If OPEN is empty, no solution exists
3. Remove the first node, n, from OPEN and put it in a list,
called CLOSED, of expanded nodes
4. Expand node n. If it has no successors, go to (2)
5. Place all successors of n at the end of the OPEN list
6. If any of the successors of n is a goal node, a solution has
been found. Otherwise go to (2)

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Breadth-First Search - Algorithm
Newly expanded nodes are added to the end of
the list

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Depth-First Search
• Expands most recent (deepest) nodes first
– Here abcdea first

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Depth-First Search - Algorithm
1. Put the start node on a list, called OPEN, of unexpanded
nodes
2. If OPEN is empty, no solution exists
3. Remove the first node, n, from OPEN and put it in a list,
called CLOSED, of expanded nodes
4. Expand node n. If it has no successors, go to (2)
5. If the depth of node n is greater than the maximum depth,
go to (2)
6. Place all successors of n at the beginning of OPEN list
7. If any of the successors of n is a goal node, a solution has
been found. Otherwise go to (2)

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Depth-First Search
• Newly expanded nodes are added at the
beginning of the list

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Uniform Cost Search
• The Breadth-First search can be generalized
slightly to solve to problem of finding the
cheapest path from a start node to a goal
state
• A non-negative cost is associated with each
arc joining two nodes
• The cost of a solution is then the sum of all
the costs along the path

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Search – Blind State Space Search
Uniform Cost Search

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 24

 Search – Blind State Space Search
Uniform Cost Search - Algorithm
1. Put the start node on a list, called OPEN, of unexpanded nodes
2. If OPEN is empty, no solution exists
3. Select from OPEN a node i such that TotalCost(i) is minimum. If several
nodes qualify choose i to be a goal node if there is one, otherwise
choose among them arbitrarily.
4. Remove node i from OPEN and place it on a list CLOSED of expanded
nodes
5. If node i is a goal node, a solution has been found
6. Expand node i, if it has no successors go to (2)
7. For each successor node j of I
– Compute TotalCost(j) = TotalCost(i) + Cost(j)
– Add node j to the OPEN list
8. Go to (2)

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Uniform Cost Search
• If we associate the cost of node i to node j
with
– -1
• the Uniform Cost Search becomes a Depth-First Search
• Since TotalCost of the node = - Depth of the node
–1
• the Uniform Cost Search becomes a Breadth-First
Search
• Since TotalCost of the node = Depth of the node

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Bidirectional Search
• The algorithms so far use forward reasoning, ie moving from
the start node towards a goal node

• In some cases we could use backward reasoning, ie moving

from the goal state to the start state

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Bidirectional Search
• Forward and backward reasoning can be
combined into a technique called bidirectional
search
• The idea is to replace a single search graph –
which is likely to grow exponentially – by two
smaller graphs
– One starting from the initial state and searching forward
– One starting from the goal state and searching backward
The search terminates when the two graphs intersect

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 Search – Blind State Space Search
Bidirectional Search
• A bidirectional version of the Uniform Cost
Search, guaranteed to find the shortest
solution path, is due to Pohl (1969, 1971)
• Empirical data for randomly generated graphs
expanded only ¼ as many nodes as
unidirectional search

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 Search – Limiting the search
• The amount of time and space is critical to find a solution
– Heuristics
– Relaxing the requirement
• Any (fast) solution, but not necessarily the best

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 Search - Heuristics
• In blind search the number of nodes can be
extremely large
– The order of expanding the nodes is arbitrary
– Blind search does not use any properties of the problem
being solved
– Result is the combinatorial explosion
• Information about a particular problem can help to
reduce the search
– The question then is: how to search the given space
efficiently

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 Search - Heuristics
• Heuristic information
– Additional information beyond that which is built into the
state and operator definitions
• Heuristic search
– A search method using that heuristic information
– Whether or not the method is foolproof
• Most of the programs were written for a single
domain – heuristics were closely intertwined in the
program and not accessible for study and adaptation
to new problems
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 Search - Heuristics
• Heuristic search
– Strategy to limit (drastically) the search for solutions in
large problem spaces
• Ways of using heuristic information
– Which node(s) to expand first instead of expanding is a
strictly depth-first or breadth-first manner
– When expanding a node, decide which successors to
generate instead of blindly generate all successors at one
time
– Which nodes not to expand at all (pruning)

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 Search – Heuristics
Ordered or Best-Fit Search
• Addresses only the first point
– Which node to expand first
– Expands fully
– The idea is to expand the node that seems most promising
– The promise of a node can be defined in several ways
• Estimate its distance to the goal node
• Estimate the length of the entire path
– In all cases the measure of promise of a node is
estimated by calling an evaluation function

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 Search – Heuristics
Ordered or Best-Fit Search
• The basic algorithm is given by Nilsson (1971)
• The evaluation function f* is defined so that
the more promising a node is, the smaller is
the value of f*
– Estimates its distance to the goal node

• The node selected for expansion is the one at

which f* is minimum
• The search space is assumed to be a general
graph
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 35
Ordered or Best-Fit Search - Algorithm
1. Put the start node s on a list called OPEN of unexpanded nodes.
Calculate f*(s) and associate its value with node s
2. If OPEN is empty, exit with failure; no solution exists
3. Select from OPEN a node i such that f*(i) is minimum. If several nodes
qualify choose i to be a goal node if there is one, otherwise choose
among them arbitrarily.
4. Remove node i from OPEN and place it on a list CLOSED of expanded
nodes
5. If i is a goal node, exit with success; a solution has been found

(continued on next slide)

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 36

Ordered or Best-Fit Search - Algorithm
6. Expand node i
7. For each successor node j of i
a. Calculate f*(j)
b. If j is neither in list OPEN or list CLOSED, add it to OPEN. Attach a
pointer back from j to its predecessor i
c. If j was already on OPEN or CLOSED, compare the f* value just
calculated with the previously calculated value
d. If the new value is lower
i. Substitute it for the old value
ii. Point j back to i instead of to its previously found predecessor
iii. If j was on the CLOSED list, move it back to OPEN
8. Go to (2)

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 A* Optimal search for an optimal solution

• Ordered search looked only at the promise of the node, not

necessarily at the minimum cost or path
• We can change f* slightly to find a minimum cost solution
• f*(n) = g*(n) + h*(n)
– g*(n) estimates the minimum cost of the start node to n
– h*(n) estimates the minimum cost of n to the goal
• h*
– is the carrier of heuristic information
– Should never overestimate the cost
• h*(n) <= h(n)

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 Example – Breadth-First Search
• Given a number of amounts, try to find a
combination of amounts that matches
another amount
• Example
– We have 10, 20, 30, 40, ….., 100
– Find all combinations that produce eg 120
• We use Breadth-First search, ie find first those
with a minimum of depth – more likely

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Total number of combinations

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 Heuristics
• Heuristic information
– Sort amounts in ascending sequence
– For each index
• Calculate minimum sum ahead
• Calculate maximum sum ahead
• Heuristic search
– Prune as soon as possible

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 Heuristics
• Construction of Min/Max sum ahead

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Heuristics

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 43

 Heuristics
• Formula to calculate how many nodes are going to be pruned

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 Heuristics
• Sign Reversal : try to prune as early as possible
• Decrease the gaps between minimum sum ahead
and maximum sum ahead as soon as possible
• Make sure the number with the highest absolute
value is at the front

• Reverse the sign of all amounts + the amount to

search if necessary

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 45

Heuristics

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 46

Heuristics