<Perimeter Search>

<John F. Dillenburg and Peter C. Nelson>


Reviewer

Levi Lovelock, llov006@auckland.ac.nz


Reference

Dillenburg, J.F., and P.C. Nelson, Perimeter search, Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 65, No. 1, Jan. 1994, pp. 165-178


Keywords

Heuristic, bidirectional, search, algorithm, 15-puzzle, think-a-dot, perimeter


Related Papers

I. Pohl, Bi-directional Search, in: B. Meltzer and D. Michie, Eds., Machine Intelligence 6,

(Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1971), 127-140.

 

D. De Champeaux and L. Sint, An Improved Bidirectional Heuristic Search Algorithm,

Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 24 (1977) 177-191.

 

J.B. Kwa, BS*: An Admissible Bidirectional Staged Heuristic Search Algorithm,

Artificial Intelligence 38 (1989) 95-109.


Summary

The authors present a novel approach to bidirectional heuristic search called Perimeter Search. They compare this to some unidirectional algorithms and provide experimental results which indicate that the new approach is indeed an improvement in the selected domains. They also provide the mathematics behind the algorithm which include equations to help set the parameters of the search algorithm.


Evaluation

I found this paper to be good in terms of explaining not only their idea, but also as a general introduction to bidirectional heuristic searches in general. It provided good intuitive descriptions of past research in the field, and how this new approach would be significantly better. I did have some trouble reading the mathematics behind their reasoning, which was complex to say the least. However I did feel comfortable that the equations did work, as they provided experimental data to back it all up. The style of writing was interesting and kept the reader’s attention throughout the majority of the article. Overall it was a very nice article.