Triangle Search: An Anytime Beam Search

Sofia Lemons, Wheeler Ruml, Carlos Linares López, Robert Holte

Keywords: anytime search, beam search

TL;DR: A new algorithm, triangle search, which provides competitive anytime results by iteratively widening and broadening.

Abstract: Anytime heuristic search algorithms try to find a (potentially suboptimal) solution as quickly as possible and then work to find better and better solutions until an optimal solution is obtained or time is exhausted. The most widely-known anytime search algorithms are based on best-first search. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, triangle search, that is based on beam search. Experimental results on a suite of popular search benchmarks suggest that it is competitive with fixed-width beam search and often performs better than the previous best anytime search algorithms.