INT4204

INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

SEARCHING
INTRODUCTION
 Questions for designing search
algorithms
 Is the problem solver guaranteed to find a
solution?
 Will the problem solver always terminate?
 When a solution is found, is it guaranteed to
be optimal?
 What is the complexity of the search process?
 How can the interpreter most effectively
reduce search complexity?
 How can the interpreter effectively utilize a
representation language?
 State space search is the tool for
answering these questions. 2
STATE SPACE SEARCH
 Before an AI problem can be solved it must be
represented as a state space.
 The state space is then searched to find a
solution to the problem.
 A state space essentially consists of a set of
nodes representing each state of the problem,
arcs between nodes representing the legal moves
from one state to another, an initial state and a
goal state.
 Each state space takes the form of a tree or a
graph.
PROBLEM FORMULATION
A problem is defined by :
1. A set of states
2. A start state
3. A goal state or goal test
4. A boolean function which tells us whether a given state is
a goal state
5. A successor function
6. Line a mapping from a state to a set of new states

2
SEARCH AND PROBLEM
SOLVING

5
SEARCH AND PROBLEM
SOLVING

6
SEARCH AND PROBLEM
SOLVING

7
SEARCH AND PROBLEM
SOLVING

 Search techniques systematically consider all

possible action sequences to find a path from
the initial to target state.

8
SIMPLE EXAMPLE
 Easiest to first look at simple examples based on
searching for route on a map.

School Factory

Hospital Newsagent
Library church

Park University

 How do we systematically and exhaustively search possible

routes, in order to find, say, route from library to university?

9
 SEARCH SPACE
 The set of all possible states reachable from the initial state defines
the search space.
 We can represent the search space as a tree.

library

school hospital

park newsagent
factory

university church

 We refer to nodes connected to and “under” a node in the tree as

“successor nodes”.
10
SEARCH STRATEGIES
 Four criteria to evaluate search strategies
 Completeness: is the strategy guaranteed to
find a solution when there is one?
 Time complexity: how long does it take to
find a solution?
 Space complexity: how much memory does it
need to perform the search?
 Optimality: does the strategy find the
highest-quality solution when there are
several different solutions?

11
SEARCH STRATEGIES
Two main categories of searching:
1. uninformed search – no information about
the number of steps or the path cost from
the current state to the goal. It is also called
blind search
 Breadth-First Search (BFS)
 Depth-First Search (DFS)

2. informed search or heuristic search —

additional information is given to help in the
search

12
BREADTH-FIRST SEARCH (BFS)
 It starts from the root node, explores the
neighboring nodes first and moves towards the
next level neighbors.
 It generates one tree at a time until the solution
is found. It can be implemented using FIFO
queue data structure.
 This method provides shortest path to the
solution.
EXAMPLE :BFS
DEPTH-FIRST SEARCH
(DFS)
 It is implemented in recursion with LIFO stack
data structure.
 It creates the same set of nodes as Breadth-
First method, only in the different order.
 Explores a path all the way to a leaf before
backtracking and exploring another path
 As the nodes on the single path are stored in
each iteration from root to leaf node, the space
requirement to store nodes is linear.
DEPTH-FIRST SEARCH (DFS) :
EXAMPLE
DFS AND BFS
ALGORITHMS
COMPARE DFS AND BFS
DFS BFS
 Depth-first vs. Breadth-
Advantages of depth- first
Advantages of breadth-
first: first:
• Simple to implement; • Guaranteed to find a
• Needs relatively small solution (if one exists);
memory for storing the • Depending on the problem,
state-space. can be guaranteed to find
an optimal solution.

Disadvantages of
depth-first:
• Can sometimes fail to find
a solution;
• Not guaranteed to find an
optimal solution;
• Can take a lot longer to
find a solution.
Disadvantages of
breadth-first:
• More complex to
implement;
• Needs a lot of memory for
storing the state space if
the search space has a high
branching factor.
TUTORIAL
TUTORIAL