Lec04 Search Intro-1689184320071

Solving problems by searching
Chapter 3
Search
• We will consider the problem of designing goal-
based agents in fully observable, deterministic,
discrete, known environments
• Example:
Start state
Goal state
Search
• We will consider the problem of designing goal-
based agents in fully observable, deterministic,
discrete, known environments
– The solution is a fixed sequence of actions
– Search is the process of looking for the sequence of
actions that reaches the goal
– Once the agent begins executing the search solution, it can
ignore its percepts (open-loop system)
Search problem components
• Initial state Initial
state
• Actions
• Transition model
– What is the result of
performing a given action
in a given state?
• Goal state
• Path cost
– Assume that it is a sum of Goal
nonnegative step costs state
• The optimal solution is the sequence of actions that gives the

lowest path cost for reaching the goal
Example: Romania
• On vacation in Romania; currently in Arad
• Flight leaves tomorrow from Bucharest
• Initial state
– Arad
• Actions
– Go from one city to another
– If you go from city A to
city B, you end up in city B
• Goal state
– Bucharest
• Path cost
– Sum of edge costs
State space
• The initial state, actions, and transition model
define the state space of the problem
– The set of all states reachable from initial state by any
sequence of actions
– Can be represented as a directed graph where the
nodes are states and links between nodes are actions
• What is the state space for the Romania problem?
Example: Vacuum world
• States
– Agent location and dirt location
– How many possible states?
– What if there are n possible locations?
• Actions
– Left, right, suck
Vacuum world state space graph
Example: The 8-puzzle
• States
– Locations of tiles
• 8-puzzle: 181,440 states
• 15-puzzle: 1.3 trillion states
• 24-puzzle: 1025 states
• Actions
– Move blank left, right, up, down
• Path cost
– 1 per move
• Finding the optimal solution of n-Puzzle is NP-hard

Example: Robot motion planning
• States
– Real-valued coordinates of robot joint angles
• Actions
– Continuous motions of robot joints
• Goal state
– Desired final configuration (e.g., object is grasped)
• Path cost
– Time to execute, smoothness of path, etc.
Search
• Given:
– Initial state
– Actions
– Transition model
– Goal state
– Path cost
• How do we find the optimal solution?

– How about building the state space and then using
Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm?
• The state space may be huge!
• Complexity of Dijkstra’s is O(E + V log V), where V is the size
of the state space
Tree Search
• Let’s begin at the start node and expand it by
making a list of all possible successor states
• Maintain a fringe or a list of unexpanded states
• At each step, pick a state from the fringe to expand
• Keep going until you reach the goal state
• Try to expand as few states as possible
Search tree
Starting
• “What if” tree of possible actions and state
outcomes
• The root node corresponds to the Action
starting state Successor
• The children of a node correspond to state
the successor states of that node’s state
• A path through the tree corresponds to …
a sequence of actions
– A solution is a path ending in the goal
state
• Nodes vs. states
… … …
– A state is a representation of a physical Goal state
configuration, while a node is a data
structure that is part of the search tree
Tree Search Algorithm Outline
• Initialize the fringe using the starting state
• While the fringe is not empty
– Choose a fringe node to expand according to search strategy
– If the node contains the goal state, return solution
– Else expand the node and add its children to the fringe
Tree search example
Tree search example
Tree search example
Fringe
Search strategies
• A search strategy is defined by picking the order of node
expansion
• 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)
Uninformed search strategies
• Uninformed search strategies use only the
information available in the problem definition
• Breadth-first search
• Uniform-cost search
• Depth-first search
• Iterative deepening search

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Solving problems by searching

• The optimal solution is the sequence of actions that gives the

• Finding the optimal solution of n-Puzzle is NP-hard

• How do we find the optimal solution?

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