Artificial Intelligence

Searching and AI
Searching falls under Artificial Intelligence (AI).

A major goal of AI is to give computers the ability to

think, or in other words, mimic human behavior.

The problem is, unfortunately, computers don't

function in the same way our minds do.

They require a series of well-reasoned out steps before

finding a solution.
 Searching and AI
Your goal, then, is to take a complicated task and
convert it into simpler steps that your computer can
handle.

That conversion from something complex to

something simple which computer can easily solve.
 HEURISTICS
 From Greek heuriskein, “to find”.
 Of or relating to a usually speculative formulation
serving as a guide in the investigation or solution
of a problem.
 Computer Science: Relating to or using a
problem-solving technique in which the most
appropriate solution, of several found by
alternative methods, is selected at successive
stages of a program for use in the next step of
the program.
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 HEURISTICS
 the study of methods and rules of discovery and
invention.

 In state space search, heuristics are formalized

as rules for choosing those branches in a state
space that are most likely to lead to an
acceptable problem solution.

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 HEURISTIC SEARCH

 Heuristics and the design of algorithms to implement

heuristic search have been an important part of artificial
intelligence research.

 Game playing and theorem proving require heuristics to

reduce search space to simplify the solution finding.

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IMPLEMENTING HEURISTIC EVALUATION FUNCTIONS
 Performance of various heuristics is evaluated for solving the 8-puzzle.

 Figure shows a start and goal state for the 8-puzzle, along with the first
three states generated in the search.

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IMPLEMENTING HEURISTIC EVALUATION FUNCTIONS
 The simplest heuristic, counts the tiles out of place in

each state when it is compared with the goal.

 The state that had fewest tiles out of place is probably

closer to the desired goal and would be the best to

examine next.

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IMPLEMENTING HEURISTIC EVALUATION FUNCTIONS

 The distance from the starting state to its descendants

can be measured by maintaining a depth count for

each state. This count is ‘0’ for the beginning state and
may be incremented by 1 for each level of the search.

 It records the actual number of moves that have been

used to go from the starting state in the search space

to each descendant.

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IMPLEMENTING HEURISTIC EVALUATION FUNCTIONS
Let evaluation function f(n), be the sum of two

components:
f(n) = g(n) + h(n)

Where:

 g(n) measures the actual length of the path from start state to
any state n.
 h(n) is a heuristic estimate of the distance from the state n to
a goal.

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IMPLEMENTING HEURISTIC EVALUATION FUNCTIONS

h(n) = 5 h(n) = 3 h(n) = 5

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• Each state is labeled with a letter and its
heuristic weight, f(n) = g(n) + h(n).

• The number at the top

of each state indicates
the order in which it
was taken off the
OPEN list.

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Successive stages of OPEN and CLOSED that generates the graph are:

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 Best-First Search
Is the new method which combine the advantages of
both depth-first and breadth-first search into single
method.

At each step of the best-first-search process, we select

the most promising of the nodes generated.

This is done by applying appropriate heuristic

function to each of them.
 Best-First Search
Then expand the chosen node by using the rules to
generate its successors.

If one of them is a solution we can quit, if not, all

those new nodes are added to the set of nodes
generated so far.

Again the most promising node is selected and the

process continues.
 ALGORITHM FOR HEURISTICS SEARCH
Best-First-Search
Best first search uses lists to maintain states:

OPEN LIST to keep track of the current fringe of the

search.
CLOSED LIST to record states already visited.

Algorithm orders the states on OPEN according to some

heuristics estimate of their closeness to a goal.

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 ALGORITHM FOR HEURISTICS SEARCH
Best-First-Search

Each iteration of the loop consider the most promising

state on the OPEN list.

Algorithm sorts and rearrange OPEN in precedence of

lowest heuristics value.

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BEST-FIRST-SEARCH

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 Explanation-BEST-FIRST-SEARCH

At each iteration best-first–search removes the first element

from the OPEN list. If it meets the goal conditions, the
algorithm returns the solution path that led to the goal.
Each state retains ancestor information to determine if it had
previously been reached by a shorter path and to allow the
algorithm to return the final solution path.
If the first element on OPEN is not a goal, the algorithm
generate its descendants.

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 BEST-FIRST-SEARCH

If a child state is already on OPEN or CLOSED, the

algorithm checks to make sure that the state records the
shorter of the two partial solution paths.

Duplicate states are not retained.

By updating the ancestor history of nodes on OPEN and

CLOSED when they are rediscovered, the algorithm is
more likely to find a shorter path to a goal.

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 BEST-FIRST-SEARCH

Best-first-search applies a heuristic evaluation to the

states on OPEN, and the list is sorted accordingly to the
heuristic values of those states. This brings the best
states to the front of OPEN .

Because these estimates are heuristic in nature, the next

state to be examined may be from any level of the state
space. When OPEN is maintained as a sorted list, it is
referred to as a priority queue.

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 BEST-FIRST-SEARCH

A HYPOTHETICAL SEARCH SPACE

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 BEST-FIRST-SEARCH

TRACES OF OPEN AND CLOSED LISTS

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