Iterative Broadening

Conventional blind search techniques generally assume that the goal nodes for a given problem are distributed randomly along the fringe of the search tree. We argue that this is often invalid in practice, suggest that a more reasonable assumption is that decisions made at each point in the search carry equal weight, and show that a new search technique that we call iterative broadening leads to orders-of-magnitude savings in the time needed to search a space satisfying this assumption. Both theoretical and experimental results are presented .