Partial-Expansion A* with Selective Node Generation

A* is often described as being 'optimal, ' in that it expands the minimum number of unique nodes. But, A* may generate many extra nodes which are never expanded. This is a performance loss, especially when the branching factor is large. Partial Expansion A* (PEA*) addresses this problem when expanding a node, n, by generating all the children of n but only storing children with the same f-cost as n. We introduce an enhanced version of PEA* (EPEA*). Given a priori domain knowledge, EPEA* only generates the children with the same f-cost as the parent. State-of-the-art results were obtained for a number of domains. Drawbacks of EPEA* are also discussed. A full version of this paper appears in the proceedings of AAAI-2012

Authors

• Ariel Felner
• Meir Goldenberg
• Guni Sharon
• Roni Stern
• Tal Beja
• Nathan R. Sturtevant
• Robert C. Holte
• Jonathan Schaeffer 0001

Keywords

No keywords are indexed for this paper.