Local Search

  • Maybe give up on all this fancy memory-intensive search? Our initial random-walk sliding-tile solver worked pretty good!

  • Use the heuristic to guide the random walk?

  • Problem: Local Minima. May get to a state s all of whose neighbors are worse than s

  • Even if moving out randomly, may immediately return to s

  • Solution: Mix greedy moves with random moves randomly, say 50/50. The random moves are "noise moves" and might walk out of local minima

  • Solution: After a while, just "restart" and hope the random walk goes better next time

  • For satisfiable instances, this works really well in practice

  • Optimality is generally terrible, though: long paths still

Sliding Tile Puzzles: Local Search

  • We have a couple of heuristics lying around from earlier

    • Total tile distance

    • Lexical out-of-place tiles

  • Throw something together and tune:

    • Noise level

    • Restart rate

Sliding Tile Puzzles: Find An Algorithm

  • Humans who play with sliding tile puzzles for a while eventually find an efficient solution algorithm

    • Put each tile in place in order by moving it there

    • When this is not possible, use a "rotation macro" to make it possible

    • When the puzzle is unsat, this will be revealed at the end when the rotation macro doesn't work

  • Produces "short" paths, but perhaps not shortest

  • "Easy" to teach a computer this algorithm. Can it figure it out on its own? Don't know

Last modified: Wednesday, 9 October 2019, 2:33 PM