Common Misconceptions Concerning Heuristic Search
Robert C. Holte · Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search · 2010
This paper examines the following statements about heuristic search, which are commonly held to be true:More accurate heuristics result in fewer node expansions by A* and IDA*.A* does fewer node expansions than any other equally informed algorithm that finds optimal solutions. Any admissible heuristic can be turned into a consistent heuristic by a simple technique called pathmax.In search spaces whose operators all have the same cost A* with the heuristic function h(s)=0 for all states, s, is the same as breadth-first search.Bidirectional A* stops when the forward and backward search frontiers meet.The paper demonstrates that all these statements are false and provides alternative statements that are true.