A Case Study on the Importance of Low-Level Algorithmic Details in Domain-Independent Heuristics

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 12

Volume

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2019): Twelfth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search

Extended Abstracts

It is known that seemingly small details such as tie-breaking among nodes with the same f-cost can significantly affect the performance of a best-first search algorithm on many domains (Asai and Fukunaga 2017). In this paper, we show that low-level algorithmic details of domain-independent planning heuristics can have a surprisingly large impact on search performance. As a case study, we consider the well-known FF heuristic (hff ) (Hoffmann and Nebel 2001).

10.1609/socs.v10i1.18480