Irrelevant operators increase the branching factor b, and this rapidly increases the size of the search space, b^d.

A human chess master considers only 1 to 3 board positions per second, but considers only at the most useful moves. A computer chess program may consider millions of positions per second, but most of those are foolish moves.

Moral: Use knowledge about the problem domain to reduce the number of operators considered at any given time.

Contents    Page-10    Prev    Next    Page+10    Index