ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

CSE 3201

Problem Characteristics and Search

 Problem Description

Reference: Artificial Intelligence by Rich and Knight (3rd Edition) 2

Problem Characteristics

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 Problem Decomposition
■ Suppose to solve the expression is: (X³ + X² + 2X + 3sinx) dx

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Can Solution Steps be Ignored?

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Is the Problem Universe Predictable?

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 Is Good Solution Absolute or Relative?
■ Consider the problem of answering questions based on a database of simple facts such
as the following:

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Is Good Solution Absolute or Relative?

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Is Good Solution Absolute or Relative?

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Is Good Solution Absolute or Relative?

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Is the Solution a State or Path?

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Is the Solution a State or Path?

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 What Is The Role of Knowledge?
Two examples:
– Chess: Knowledge is required to constrain the search for a
solution
– Newspaper story understanding: Lot of knowledge is required
even to be able to recognize a solution.

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 What Is The Role of Knowledge?
■ Consider a problem of scanning daily newspapers to decide which are supporting the
democrats and which are supporting the republicans in some election. We need lots of
knowledge to answer such questions as:
– The names of the candidates in each party
– The facts that if the major thing you want to see done is have
taxes lowered, you are probably supporting the republicans
– The fact that if the major thing you want to see done is improved education
for minority students, you are probably supporting the democrats.

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 Search and Problem Solving
■ In solving problems, we sometimes have to search through many possible ways of doing
something.
– We may know all the possible actions our robot can do, but we have to consider
various sequences to find a sequence of actions to achieve a goal.
– We may know all the possible moves in a chess game, but we must consider many
possibilities to find a good move.
■ Many problems can be formalized in a general way as search problems.

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 Search and Problem Solving
■ Search problems described in terms of:
– An initial state. (e.g., initial chessboard, current positions of objects in world, current
location)
– A target state.(e.g., winning chess position, target location)
– Some possible actions, that get you from one state to another. (e.g. chess move, robot
action, simple change in location).
• Search techniques systematically consider all possible action sequences to find a path
from the initial to target state.

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Search Through State-Space

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Search Problem Example (as a tree)

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 Search Strategies
■ Features by which to compare search strategies
– Completeness (always find solution)
– Cost of search (time and space)
– Cost of solution, optimal solution
– Make use of knowledge of the domain
“uninformed search” vs. “informed search”

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 Simple Example
■ Easiest to first look at simple examples based on searching
for route on a map.

■ How do we systematically search possible routes, in order to find, say, route from
library to university?

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 Search Space
■ The set of all possible states reachable from the initial state defines the search space.
■ We can represent the search space as a tree.

■ We refer to nodes connected to and “under” a node in the tree as “successor nodes”.

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 Simple Search Techniques
■ How do we search this tree to find a possible route from library to University?
■ May use simple search techniques, which try every possibility in systematic way.
– Breadth first search - Try shortest paths first.
– Depth first search - Follow a path as far as it goes, and when reach dead end, backup
and try last encountered alternative.

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 Search Strategies
■ Evaluation Criteria:
■ Strategies are evaluated along the following dimensions:
– Completeness: does it always find a solution if one exists?
– Optimality: does it always find a least-cost solution?
– Time complexity: number of nodes generated
– Space complexity: maximum number of nodes in memory
■ Time and space complexity are measured in terms of
– b: maximum branching factor of the search tree
– d: depth of the least-cost solution
– m: maximum length of any path in the state space (may be infinite)

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