Abstract
This paper presents a general procedure for finding an optimal solution tree of an acyclic AND/OR graph with monotone cost functions. Due to the relationship between AND/OR graphs and game trees, it can also be used as a game tree search procedure. Seemingly disparate procedures like AO*, SSS*, alpha-beta, B* are instantiations of this general procedure. This sheds new light on their interrelationships and nature, and simplifies their correctness proofs. Furthermore, the procedure is applicable to a very large class of problems, and thus provides a way of synthesizing algorithms for new applications. The procedure searches an AND/OR graph in a top-down manner (by selectively developing various potential solutions) and can be viewed as a general branch-and-bound procedure.
This chapter is a revised version of Chapter 6 of the first author’s 1982 PhD dissertation [10].
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Kumar, V., Nau, D.S., Kanal, L.N. (1988). A General Branch-and-Bound Formulation for AND/OR Graph and Game Tree Search. In: Kanal, L., Kumar, V. (eds) Search in Artificial Intelligence. Symbolic Computation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8788-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8788-6_3
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