State-Space Search

Book excerpt: This book is particularly concerned with heuristic state-space search for combinatorial optimization. Its two central themes are the average-case complexity of state-space search algorithms and the applications of the results notably to branch-and-bound techniques. Primarily written for researchers in computer science, the author presupposes a basic familiarity with complexity theory, and it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the basic concepts of random variables and recursive functions. Two successful applications are presented in depth: one is a set of state-space transformation methods which can be used to find approximate solutions quickly, and the second is forward estimation for constructing more informative evaluation functions.