Towards a Better Understanding of Bidirectional Search

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 4

Automated Reasoning

Three admissible bidirectional search algorithms have been described in the literature: A Cartesian product approach due to Doran, Pohl’s BHPA, and Champeaux and Sint’s BHFFA2. This paper describes an algorithm, GP, which contains the latter two and others. New admissibility results are obtained. A first order analysis is made comparing the run times of Cartesian product search, two versions of GP, and unidirectional A . The goal is to gain insight on when bidirectional search is useful and direction for seeking better bidirectional search algorithms.