Introduction To

Planning & State-Space Search

G51IAI – Introduction to AI
Andrew Parkes
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~ajp/
 UCS for Graph Search
• From last lecture:

• Uniform Cost Search finds a min-cost path to a goal

in a graph

• Search pattern:
“Search all nodes of cost c before those of cost c+1”

• Method:
1. store the cost g of the path used to reach the node
2. use such costs in deciding the ordering in the queue
 Uniform Cost Search (UCS)
• Explicitly store the cost of a node with
that node – convention “g” is the path-
cost
• Queue Processing: Always remove
the smallest cost node first

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 Uniform Cost Search in Graph
1. fringe  MAKE-EMPTY-QUEUE()
2. fringe  INSERT( root_node ) // with g=0
3. loop {
1. if fringe is empty then return false // finished without goal
2. node  REMOVE-SMALLEST-COST(fringe)
3. if node is a goal
1. print node and g
2. return true // that found a goal
4. Lg  EXPAND(node) // Lg is set of neighbours with their g costs
// NOTE: do not check Lg for goals here!!
5. fringe  INSERT-IF-NEW(Lg, fringe ) // ignore revisited nodes
// unless is with new better g
}

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 Properties of UCS
• Completeness:
– If there is a path to a goal then UCS will find it
– If there is no path, then UCS will eventually report
that the goal is unreachable
• Optimality:
– UCS will report a minimum cost path (there might
be many)
• Systematic:
– With appropriate code to prevent re-visiting nodes
UCS will only expand each node once
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Complexity of UCS on a Graph
• Suppose graph has n nodes and e edges
– e.g. n cities, and e roads
• Worst case (e.g. no goal is reachable)
– nodes expanded: n
– work per node O(n) (check that not already visited)
– edges visited O(e) = O(n2)
– overall O(n2)
• So UCS is polynomial time in size of graph
• But “AI is hard because of problems for which time needed
is exponential in the size of the problem”
• Paradox?
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When is UCS exponentially hard?
• The graph itself can be exponentially sized!
• The size of the natural description of the
problem might be a number S
– but the graph itself has size exponential in S
– the graph itself is not given directly
– only get a “set of rules” to generate the graph
• “Planning” is an example of this
• First an easier example: the hypercube

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 Example of “Implicit Graph”
• “Hypercube in n dimensions”
– nodes
• any binary (0’s and 1’s) string with n digits
• e.g. 1000101 for n=7
– edge between nodes n1 and n2 if and only
if they differ only in one digit
• e.g. 1000101 has an edge to
1000111 but not to
1000011
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 Hypercube Example: Cube
• Example: n=3, a cube,
– nodes: 000, 001, 010, etc for “xyz coordinates”
• e.g. “001” means “(x,y,z)=(0,0,1)”
– edges: node 000 has edges to 001,010,100

(0,0,1)

(0,1,0)

(0,0,0) (1,0,0)
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 Example of Implicit Graph
• Hypercube in n dimensions
– node= binary number with n digits
– edge between nodes n1 and n2 iff they differ only in one digit
• Size of description: just the space to write the value of n
• Number of nodes: 2n
• Number of edges: 2n * 3 / 2
• The graph itself is exponentially bigger
than our description of it.
• On discussing “polynomial or exponential in the size” we need
to be careful what we mean by “the size”
• Similar things do happen with planning problems & puzzles

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 Planning & Puzzles
• These are search problems in which we have
some system and
– the system can be in many different states
– want to transform it from one state into another
– by applying a sequence of actions
• Examples:
– Towers of Hanoi
– Tile Puzzles
– Coursework TWO
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 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

“State: The positions of the rings

“Action”: Move one ring at a time
Rules: No ring can ever be on top of a smaller ring
Goal: Move the “tower” to “peg 2”
 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

Note: it was illegal to move the green on top of the red

 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

Note: finally we get to move blue to its final place

 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

Note: SUCCESS in 7 moves

 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem - Towers of Hanoi

• Analysis of the problem shows that the lower
bound for the number of moves is

2N-1

• Since N appears as the exponent we have an

exponential function
• The number of reachable states is at least
this large
 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem Definition - 1

• Initial State
– The initial state of the problem,
defined in some suitable manner

• Operator
– a.k.a. “action”, or “move”
– A set of actions that moves the
problem from one state to
another
 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem Definition - 1

• Neighbourhood
(Successor Function)
– The set of all possible states
reachable from a given state
with one move

• State Space
– The set of all legal states
 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem Definition - 2

• Goal Test
– A test applied to a state which
returns if we have reached a
state that solves the problem

• Path Cost
– How much it costs to take a
particular path
 G51IAI Planning

Planning Problem Definition - 2

• Plan
– A sequence of actions applied to
a state to transform it into
another state
– Takes us from the initial state to
the goal state

• Optimal Plan
– A mincost plan, i.e. a plan with
minimal path cost
 G51IAI Planning

Problem Definition – Tile Puzzle Example

5 4 1 4
2 7
3
6 1 8 4
2
8 5 6
8
4
7 3 2 7
3 8
6 5

Initial State Goal State

 G51IAI Planning

Problem Definition - Example

• States
– A description of each of the eight
tiles in each location that it can
occupy. It is also useful to
include the blank
• Operators
– The blank moves left, right, up or
down
 G51IAI Planning

Problem Definition - Example

• Goal Test
– The current state matches a
certain state (e.g. one of the
ones shown on previous slide)
• Path Cost
– Each move of the blank costs 1
 Planning Graphs 1

• How does the tile puzzle relate to previous

lectures on searching a graph?
• Regard each puzzle state as a node of a
graph
• Actions, “move blank”, correspond to legal
moves between the states.
– actions generate edges between the nodes
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 Planning Graphs 2

• Actions, “move blank”, correspond to legal

moves between the states.
– actions generate edges between the nodes
• Finding a “plan”: ...
– find a legal sequence of actions from initial to final
state
• ... becomes “find a path to a goal”
– find a path from initial to final node
• “Find an optimal plan”, becomes
– find a mincost path through the planning graph
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 Tile Puzzle - History
• Why is the puzzle so popular?
– Invented by Sam Loyd in 1870’s
– On the 4x4 version, the 15-puzzle, he offered a prize of
$1000 prize to transform a particular initial state to a
particular final state

• “Trick Question”
– The problem was unsolvable
– The state space splits into two disconnected pieces
– The “planning graph” is not connected
– Only half the potential states are reachable from any state
– The reachable state space is 9!/2 = 181440

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 Planning Representations 1
• Paradox? Consider the 24-puzzle.
• In very little space we managed to describe a
planning problem for which the graph has 25! nodes
and about 4*25! edges
• This takes far too much space to write down explicitly
• Instead:
– we are describing the state logically
– val(2,2) = 9 means the “9” tile is at coords (2,2)
– these are function of time
• That is we can describe the state sequence by means
of val(x,y,t)

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 Planning Representations 2
• Actions are described by rules for changing the state
• “move blank from (1,1) at time t to (1,2) at time
t+1” becomes
if val(1,1,t) = B then permit {
val(1,2,t+1) := B
val(1,1,t+1 ) := val(1,2,t)
}
• And nothing else changed
• Note that such a move applies independently of the
values for the other squares and so describes many
edges in the graph

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 Planning Representations 3
• In general representing the effects of change in the
real-world is very hard
• E.g. “Ramification problem”
– e.g. if I drive to derby – some things will
automatically change, but not others
• cell phone tower
• but not cell phone number
– in real-world then this can be hard to represent

• Puzzles and simple planning domains do not have

this problem

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 Planning Representations 4
• The standard way in AI to formally express a
planning problem is using the “STRIPS” notation
• STRIPS : contains
– “fluents” : the logical quantities that describe the
state and change as a function of time
– Actions are described using
– preconditions : circumstances in which the action
applies
– “add & delete rules” for the changes to the fluents

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 Planning Representations 5
• The standard way in AI to formally express a
planning problem is using the “STRIPS” notation
• A lot of work has gone into solving planning
problems expressed in STRIPS notation
• There are general purpose solvers that take any
problem expressed in STRIPS
• STRIPS forms an important part of AI history and
current usage
• You do not need to know how to use STRIPS for this
course just how to do actions “by hand”
– But (clue!), a part of the history of STRIPS is relevant to
coursework TWO

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 Why are planning/puzzles hard?
• The associated “graph” is exponential in
the number of tiles
• We can still use the same blind search methods:
– BFS, UCS
• On realistic size problems blind search will use far too
much memory and time
• Need to improve the search methods
– planning problems, and puzzles such as tile puzzle, have
driven a lot of progress in search methods
– improved methods are heuristic and use information about
the likely location of goals

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 Summary
• Planning problems
– States
– Operators (a.k.a. actions, successor, etc)
• Can be thought of as defining implicitly a graph
– node = state
– edge = action
• But the graphs are much bigger than maps, mazes,
etc
• These drive the need for better search methods
• Next Lecture: Informed search methods

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Questions?

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