Iterative-deepening search with on-line tree size prediction

Abstract

The memory requirements of best-first graph search algorithms such as A* often prevent them from solving large problems. The best-known approach for coping with this issue is iterative deepening, which performs a series of bounded depth-first searches. Unfortunately, iterative deepening only performs well when successive cost bounds visit a geometrically increasing number of nodes. While it happens to work acceptably for the classic sliding tile puzzle, IDA* fails for many other domains. In this paper, we present an algorithm that adaptively chooses appropriate cost bounds on-line during search. During each iteration, it learns a model of the search tree that helps it to predict the bound to use next. Our search tree model has three main benefits over previous approaches: (1) it will work in domains with real-valued heuristic estimates, (2) it can be trained on-line, and (3) it is able to make more accurate predictions with only a small number of training examples. We demonstrate the power of our improved model by using it to control an iterative-deepening A* search on-line. While our technique has more overhead than previous methods for controlling iterative-deepening A*, it can give more robust performance by using its experience to accurately double the amount of search effort between iterations.