November 2024
Intermediate to advanced
416 pages
11h 11m
English
This chapter introduces heuristic-guided search algorithms, sometimes called best-first searches. These algorithms incorporate heuristic information about nodes’ estimated distance from the goal to prioritize the order in which to explore them. By focusing on the most promising paths toward the goal, they can achieve significant computational savings.
As we saw in the last chapter, finding the shortest (or lowest-cost) path from a specified start node to a specified goal node mirrors the daily task of navigating through the world. When planning a route to work or the store, we might measure cost by the time taken, ...