Searching

• If you've refined your problem into a search space, all you need to do is search.
• Marvin Minsky, one of the four fathers of AI, thinks that the key to solving AI is finding a better search method.
• Certain search techniques are appropriate for certain spaces.
• One type of search technique is called exhaustive search. Examples of this are depth first search and breadth first search.
• Subgoaling (backward chaining) is a type of depth first search.
• When might this not be appropriate? (A state space with loops.)
• Another type of domain specific search is heuristic search. Many rule based systems are simply this.
• Other types of search are hill climbing, simulated annealing, minimax (for game playing), A*, and for that matter genetic algorithms and multi-layer perceptrons.
• A related idea is the value of a state. If you can't do exhaustive search, you might be able to search by moving from the current state to the best next state. You can have some look-ahead.
• What would be the value of the state of a tic-tac-toe game?
• What would be the value of the state of a chess game?
• How would you describe a stock portfolio with search spaces and values.