Easy and Hard Testbeds for Real-Time Search Algorithms

Although researchers have studied which factors influence the behavior of traditional search algorithms, currently not much is known about how domain properties influence the performance of real-time search algorithms. In this paper we demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, that Eulerian state spaces(a supersetof undirected state spaces)are very easy for some existing real-time search algorithms to solve: even real-time search algorithms that can be intractable, in general, are efficient for Eulerian state spaces. Because traditional real-time search testbeds (such as the eight puzzle and gridworlds) are Eulerian, they cannot be used to distinguish between efficient and inefficient real-time search algorithms. It follows that one has to use non-Eulerian domains to demonstrate the general superiority of a given algorithm. To this end, we present two classes of hard-to-search state spaces and demonstrate the performance of various real-time search algorithms on them.