English

Rational Deployment of CSP Heuristics

Artificial Intelligence 2011-04-12 v1

Abstract

Heuristics are crucial tools in decreasing search effort in varied fields of AI. In order to be effective, a heuristic must be efficient to compute, as well as provide useful information to the search algorithm. However, some well-known heuristics which do well in reducing backtracking are so heavy that the gain of deploying them in a search algorithm might be outweighed by their overhead. We propose a rational metareasoning approach to decide when to deploy heuristics, using CSP backtracking search as a case study. In particular, a value of information approach is taken to adaptive deployment of solution-count estimation heuristics for value ordering. Empirical results show that indeed the proposed mechanism successfully balances the tradeoff between decreasing backtracking and heuristic computational overhead, resulting in a significant overall search time reduction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1104.1924,
  title  = {Rational Deployment of CSP Heuristics},
  author = {David Tolpin and Solomon Eyal Shimony},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.1924},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

7 pages, 2 figures, to appear in IJCAI-2011, http://www.ijcai.org/

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:52:18.546Z