Title
"Distance"? Who Cares? Tailoring Merge-and-Shrink Heuristics to Detect Unsolvability.
Abstract
Research on heuristic functions is all about estimating the length (or cost) of solution paths. But what if there is no such path? Many known heuristics have the ability to detect (some) unsolvable states, but that ability has always been treated as a by-product. No attempt has been made to design heuristics specifically for that purpose, where there is no need to preserve distances. As a case study towards leveraging that advantage, we investigate merge-and-shrink abstractions in classical planning. We identify safe abstraction steps (no information loss regarding solvability) that would not be safe for traditional heuristics. We design practical algorithm configurations, and run extensive experiments showing that our heuristics outperform the state of the art for proving planning tasks unsolvable.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.3233/978-1-61499-419-0-441
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications
Field
DocType
Volume
Mathematical optimization,Heuristic,Information loss,Abstraction,Computer science,Heuristics,Merge (version control)
Conference
263
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0922-6389
17
0.62
References 
Authors
16
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jörg Hoffmann113313.17
Peter Kissmann218113.93
Álvaro Torralba38115.12