Third edition of Artificial Intelligence: foundations of computational agents, Cambridge University Press, 2023 is now available (including the full text).

3.7 More Sophisticated Search

A number of refinements can be made to the preceding strategies. First, we present two methods that are applicable when there are cycles in the graph; one checks explicitly for cycles, whereas the other method checks for multiple paths to a node. Next, we present iterative deepening and depth-first branch-and-bound searches, which are general methods that are guaranteed to find a solution (even an optimal solution), like breadth-first search or A* search, but using the space advantages of depth-first search. We present problem-reduction methods to break down a search problem into a number of smaller search problems, each of which may be much easier to solve. Finally, we show how dynamic programming can be used for path finding and for constructing heuristic functions.