Nonsystematic backtracking search
William D. Harvey · 1995
Many practical problems in Artificial Intelligence have search trees that are too large to search exhaustively in the amount of time allowed. Systematic techniques such as chronological backtracking can be applied to these problems, but the order in which they examine nodes makes them unlikely to find a solution in the explored fraction of the space. Nonsystematic techniques have been proposed to alleviate the problem by searching nodes in a random order. A technique known as iterative sampling follows random paths from the root of the tree to the fringe, stopping if a path ends at a goal node. Although the nonsystematic techniques do not suffer from the problem of exploring nodes in a bad order, they do reconsider nodes they have already ruled out, a problem that is serious when the density of solutions in the tree is low. Unfortunately, for many practical problems the order of examing nodes matters and the density of solutions is low. Consequently, neither chronological backtracking...