Predicting Optimal Solution Cost with Bidirectional Stratified Sampling (Abstract)

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, 5

Volume

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2012): Fifth Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search

Extended Abstracts of Papers Presented Elsewhere

Optimal planning and heuristic search systems solve state-space searchproblems by finding a least-cost path from start to goal. As a byproduct of having an optimal path they also determine the optimal solution cost. In this paper we focus on the problem of determining the optimal solution cost for a state-space search problem directly, i.e., without actually finding a solution path of that cost. We present an efficient algorithm, BiSS, based on ideas of bidirectional search and stratified sampling that produces accurate estimates of the optimal solution cost. Our method is guaranteed to return the optimal solution cost in the limit as the sample size goes to infinity.

10.1609/socs.v3i1.18223