PROBLEM SOLVING AGENTS

STEPS FOLLOWED
▪ Goal Formulation:
⮚It is the first and simplest step in problem-solving.

⮚ It organizes the steps/sequence required to formulate one goal out of multiple goals as
well as actions to achieve that goal.

⮚Goal formulation is based on the current situation and the agent’s performance measure

▪ Problem Formulation:
⮚ It is the most important step of problem-solving which decides what actions should be
taken to achieve the formulated goal.

⮚ There are five components involved in problem formulation 3/21/2024 2

 PROBLEM FORMULATION-
COMPONENTS
▪ Initial State: Starting state or initial step of the agent towards its goal.

▪ Actions: Description of the possible actions available to the agent.

▪ Transition Model: Describes what each action does.

▪ Goal Test: Determines if the given state is a goal state.

▪ Path cost: It assigns a numeric cost to each path that follows the goal. The problem-solving agent
selects a cost function, which reflects its performance measure.

▪ Optimal solution: Lowest path cost among all the solutions.

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HOLIDAY IN ROMANIA

Formulate Goal: be in Bucharest

Formulate Problem:
States: Various cities
Action: Drive between cities
Find Solution:
Sequence of cities.
Eg: Arad, Sibiu, Fagaras, Bucharest

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TWO TYPES OF PROBLEM
APPROACHES
▪ Toy Problem: It is a concise and exact description of the problem which is used by
the researchers to compare the performance of algorithms.

Eg: Number Slider Problem, N-Queens Problem

▪ Real-world Problem: It is real-world based problems which require solutions. Unlike

a toy problem, it does not depend on descriptions, but we can have a general
formulation of the problem.

Eg: Travelling Salesman Problem, VLSI Layout Problem

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 EXAMPLE: N-QUEENS
PROBLEM
For this problem, there are two main kinds of formulation:
1. Incremental formulation: It starts from an empty state where the operator augments a queen at
each step.
Following steps are involved in this formulation:
▪ States: Arrangement of any 0 to 8 queens on the chessboard.
▪ Initial State: An empty chessboard
▪ Actions: Add a queen to any empty box.
▪ Transition model: Returns the chessboard with the queen added in a box.
▪ Goal test: Checks whether 8-queens are placed on the chessboard without any attack.
▪ Path cost: There is no need for path cost because only final states are counted.

In this formulation, there is approximately 1.8 x 1014 possible sequence to investigate.

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 EXAMPLE: N-QUEENS
PROBLEM
2. Complete-state formulation: It starts with all the 8-queens on the chessboard and moves them
around, saving from the attacks.

Following steps are involved in this formulation

▪ States: Arrangement of all the 8 queens one per column with no queen attacking the other queen.

▪ Actions: Move the queen at the location where it is safe from the attacks.

This formulation is better than the incremental formulation as it reduces the state space from 1.8 x
1014 to 2057 , and it is easy to find the solutions.
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SEARCH TECHNIQUES
Search: Step by step procedure to solve a search-problem in a given search space. A
search problem can have three main factors:

1.Search Space: Search space represents a set of possible solutions, which a system
may have.

2.Start State: It is a state from where agent begins the search.

3.Goal test: It is a function which observe the current state and returns whether the goal
state is achieved or not.
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PROBLEM’S STATE-SPACE
▪ State-space of a problem-Set of all states which can be reached from the initial state
followed by any sequence of actions.

▪ Directed map or graph where nodes are the states, links between the nodes are actions,
and the path is a sequence of states connected by the sequence of actions.

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 MEASURING PROBLEM-
SOLVING PERFORMANCE
There are four ways to measure the performance of an algorithm:
▪ Completeness: It measures if the algorithm guarantees to find a solution
(if any solution exist).
▪ Optimality: It measures if the strategy searches for an optimal solution.
▪ Time Complexity: The time taken by the algorithm to find a solution.
▪ Space Complexity: Amount of memory required to perform a search.

The complexity of an algorithm depends on branching factor, depth of the shallowest

goal node and the maximum length of any path in a state space.

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TYPES OF SEARCH STRATEGIES

• Breadth-first search
• Uniform-cost search
• Depth-first search
Uninformed • Depth-limited search
search • Iterative deepening depth-first search
• Bidirectional search

• Greedy best-first search

• A* search
Informed • Memory-bounded heuristic search
search

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BREADTH-FIRST SEARCH
( BFS )
▪ Expand shallowest unexpanded node first
▪ Frontier is a FIFO Queue

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BFS - PSEUDOCODE

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 BFS- PROPERTIES
▪Complete? Yes (if b is finite)

▪Time? 1+b+b2+b3+… +bd + b(bd-1) = O(bd+1)

▪Space? O(bd+1) (keeps every node in memory)

▪Optimal? Yes (if cost = 1 per step)

▪ Space complex than Time Complex

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 UNIFORM-COST SEARCH ( UCS )
▪ Expand least cost unexpanded node first
▪ Frontier is a Priority Queue ordered by Path
cost
▪ Equivalent to BFS if all step-costs = 1
▪ Goal test performed when selected for expanding
whereas in BFS performed when generated.

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UCS - PSEUDOCODE

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 UCS- PROPERTIES
▪ Complete? Guaranteed only if all the step costs are positive

▪ Time? O(b^[1+(C*/ e)]) C* - optimal path cost, e- step cost

▪ Space? O(b^[1+(C*/ e)])) (keeps every node in memory)

▪ Optimal? Yes (if cost = least at each step)

▪ UCS is worse than BFS in both Space & Time Complexity

▪ Opt only if path cost differs & is non-decreasing

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DEPTH-FIRST SEARCH ( DFS )

▪ Expand deepest unexpanded node first

▪ Frontier is a LIFO Queue, i.e. Put
successor nodes first

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 DFS- PROPERTIES

▪Complete? Complete in finite spaces and incomplete in infinite-depth spaces

▪ Time? O(b^m): terrible if m is much larger than d but if solutions are dense, may be
much faster than breadth-first.

▪Space? O(bm ), i.e., linear space

▪Optimal? No ( the number of steps & cost spent in reaching the solution is high )

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DEPTH-LIMITED SEARCH
( DLS )
▪ A depth-limited search algorithm is similar to depth-first search with a predetermined
limit.
▪ Depth-limited search can solve the drawback of the infinite path in the Depth-first
search. In this algorithm, the node at the depth limit will treat as it has no successor
nodes further.

Expands nodes only if depth d<= L

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DLS - PSEUDOCODE

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 DLS- PROPERTIES
▪Complete? No, if L<=d

▪ Time? O(b^L)

▪Space? O(bL)

▪Optimal? No, if L<=d

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 ITERATIVE DEEPENING
DEPTH-FIRST SEARCH ( IDS )
▪ What if solution is deeper than L?
▪ Increase L iteratively
▪ Solves both infinite depth problem & optimality problem in DFS & DLS

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 IDS/ IDLS- PROPERTIES
▪Complete? Yes, Increases depth iteratively till goal reached

▪ Time? O(b^d)

▪Space? O(bd)

▪Optimal? Yes, if step cost=1 or increases depth function

Actually faster than breadth-first search!

It does better because other nodes at depth d are not expanded

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SUMMARY OF UNINFORMED
SEARCH STRATEGIES

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 BIDIRECTIONAL SEARCH
▪ Runs two simultaneous searches, one form initial state called as forward-search and other from
goal node called as backward-search, to find the goal node.
▪ Replaces one single search graph with two small subgraphs in which one starts the search from an
initial vertex and other starts from goal vertex.
▪ The search stops when these two graphs intersect each other.
▪ Bidirectional search can use search techniques such as BFS, DFS, DLS, etc.
Advantages:
• Bidirectional search is fast.
• Bidirectional search requires less memory
Disadvantages:
• Implementation of the bidirectional search tree is difficult.
• In bidirectional search, one should know the goal state in advance.
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BIDIRECTIONAL SEARCH

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 BDS- PROPERTIES
▪ Complete? Yes, if BFS used in both searches

▪ Time? O(b^(d/2))

▪ Space? O(b^(d/2})

▪ Optimal? Yes, if BFS used in both searches & paths have uniform cost

BFS detects duplicate nodes while DFS fails

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