Searching Without a Heuristic: Efficient Use of Abstraction

g Without a Heuristic: Efficient Use of Abstraction Bradford Larsen, Ethan Burns, Wheeler Ruml Department of Computer Science University of New Hampshire Durham, NH 03824 USA blarsen, eaburns, ruml at cs.unh.edu Robert C. Holte Department of Computing Science University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E8 Canada holte at cs.ualberta.ca In problem domains where an informative heuristic evaluation function is not known or not easily computed, abstraction can be used to derive admissible heuristic values. Opth lengths in the abstracted problem are consistent heuristic estimates for the original problem. Pattern databases are the traditional method of creating such heuristics, but austively compute costs for all abstract states and are thus usually appropriate only when all instances share the same single goal state. Hierarchical heuristic search algorithms address these shortcomings by searching for paths in the abstract space on an as-needed basis. However, existing hierarchical algori...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Bradford John Larsen, Ethan Burns, Wheeler Ruml, Robert Holte
• Keywords: AAAI 2010, Heuristic, Heuristic Search Algorithms, Hierarchical Heuristic Search, Intelligent Agents