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arXiv · 2312.12554

Rectangle Search: An Anytime Beam Search (Extended Version)

Sofia Lemons·Wheeler Ruml·Robert C. Holte·Carlos Linares López
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Abstract

Anytime heuristic search algorithms try to find a (potentially suboptimal) solution as quickly as possible and then work to find better and better solutions until an optimal solution is obtained or time is exhausted. The most widely-known anytime search algorithms are based on best-first search. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, rectangle search, that is instead based on beam search, a variant of breadth-first search. It repeatedly explores alternatives at all depth levels and is thus best-suited to problems featuring deep local minima. Experiments using a variety of popular search benchmarks suggest that rectangle search is competitive with fixed-width beam search and often performs better than the previous best anytime search algorithms.

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Sofia Lemons, Wheeler Ruml, Robert C. Holte, Carlos Linares López. 2023-12-19. Rectangle Search: An Anytime Beam Search (Extended Version). https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.12554

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