I am enrolled in Stanford's ai-class.com and have just learned in my first week of lecture about a* algorithm and how it's better used then other search algo.
I also show one of my class mate implement it on 4x4 sliding block puzzle which he has published at: http://george.mitsuoka.org/StanfordAI/slidingBlocks/
While i very much appreciate and thank George to implement A* and publishing the result for our amusement.
I (and he also) were wondering if there is any way to make the process more optimized or if there is a better heuristic A*, like better heuristic function than the max of "number of blocks out of place" or "sum of distances to goals" that would speed things up?
and Also if there is a better algo then A* for such problems, i would like to know about them as well.
Thanks for the help and in case of discrepancies, before down grading my profile please allow me a chance to upgrade my approach or even if req to delete the question, as am still learning the ways of stackoverflow.
It depends on your heuristic function. for example, if you have a perfect heuristic [h*], then a greedy algorithm(*), will yield better result then A*, and will still be optimal [since your heuristic is perfect!]. It will develop only the nodes needed for the solution. Unfortunately, it is seldom the case that you have a perfect heuristic.
(*)greedy algorithm: always develop the node with the lowest h value.
However, if your heuristic is very bad: h=0, then A* is actually a BFS! And A* in this case will develop O(B^d) nodes, where B is the branch factor and d is the number of steps required for solving.
In this case, since you have a single target function, a bi-directional search (*) will be more efficient, since it needs to develop only O(2*B^(d/2))=O(B^(d/2)) nodes, which is much less then what A* will develop.
bi directional search: (*)run BFS from the target and from the start nodes, each iteration is one step from each side, the algorithm ends when there is a common vertex in both fronts.
For the average case, if you have a heuristic which is not perfect, but not completely terrbile, A* will probably perform better then both solutions.
Possible optimization for average case: You also can run bi-directional search with A*: from the start side, you can run A* with your heuristic, and a regular BFS from the target side. Will it get a solution faster? no idea, you should probably benchmark the two possibilities and find which is better. However, the solution found with this algorithm will also be optimal, like BFS and A*.
The performance of A* is based on the quality of the expected cost heuristic, as you learned in the videos. Getting your expected cost heuristic to match as closely as possible to the actual cost from that state will reduce the total number of states that need to be expanded. There are also a number of variations that perform better under certain circumstances, like for instance when faced with hardware restrictions in large state space searching.
Related
In a reputable Algorithmic book , it was mentioned that breadth first search is a greedy algorithm. But I searched for it but I found many links that doesn't say so.
My question:
Is breadth first search a Greedy Algorithm and why ?
Can you give me a notable reference for your answer ?!
The term "greedy algorithm" refers to algorithms that solve optimization problems.
BFS is not specifically for solving optimization problems, so it doesn't make sense (i.e., it's not even wrong) to say that BFS is a greedy algorithm unless you are applying it to an optimization problem. In that case, the statement is true or not depending on how it is applied.
The "reputable algorithm book" probably refers to BFS in the context of a specific optimization problem, and is probably correct to say that it is a greedy algorithm in that context... which you have omitted in your question.
The simple answer is YES. To better understand this I would suggest reading on greedy vs heuristics algorithm.
Greedy algorithms supply an exact solution! Heuristic algorithms use probability and statistics in order to avoid running through all the possibilities and provide an "estimated best solution" (which means that if a better solution exists, it will be only slightly better).
A greedy algorithms follow locally optimal solution at each stage. While searching for the best solution, the best so far solution is only updated if the search finds a better solution. Whereas this is not always the case with heuristic algorithms (e.g. genetic, evolutionary, Tabu search, ant search, and so forth). Heuristic algorithms may update the best so far even if it's worse than the best so far to avoid getting trapped in a local optimal solution.
Therefore, in nutshell BFS/DFS generally fall under greedy algorithms.
I understand greedy as "try the best you've got for a given moment".
A BFS, when visiting a node, just adds its children to a queue. There isn't really a "better child" in a BFS since it travels the graph by covering layer by layer. When a node is visited, any order of its children can be added to the queue, so no child seem to be a better choice, hence it doesn't make sense to me that it is greedy, once there is no necessarily a better choice for each moment of the algorithm.
I think there's a confusion here.
Maybe you read BFS Greedy and you think it's Breadth First Search Greedy, but the truth is it's Best First Search Greedy. This is another way to call the usual Greedy algorithm applied to searches.
Say I am finding a path in a house using A* algorithm. Now the running time could be O(n^2).
I was thinking will it improve the performance if I knew which doors to follow and according I shall apply A* on it i.e. if I have the starting position S and final position as F, and instead of applying the A* on these two end points, will be be better if I applied the A* on
`S` and `A1`
`A1` and `A2`
`A2` and F.
Where A1 and A2 are my intermediates(doors) that shall be followed for the shortest path? Will it be worth the improvement to find the intermediates and then follow the path and not just apply A* directly on starting and ending.
Considering it takes linear time to find the intermediates.
Yes, that will help a lot in case the algorithm takes O(n^2) behavior at runtime. Instead of one big problem you get two smaller problems with each being 1/4 as expensive to compute.
I'm sure there are pathological cases where it doesn't help or even hurt but in your scenario (house) it would probably help a lot.
I imagine that you are using the fact that one has to go up an elevator or stairs to change floors. That would help A* a lot because the cost function now has to work only within a single floor. It will be very representative of the real cost. In contrast to that the cost function would be greatly underestimating the distance if you wanted to move into the same room but one floor higher. Euclidean distance would fail totally in that case (and the algorithm would degrade into an exhaustive search). First moving to the stairs and then moving from the stairs to the desired room would work much better.
I'm developing a trip planer program. Each city has a property called rateOfInterest. Each road between two cities has a time cost. The problem is, given the start city, and the specific amount of time we want to spend, how to output a path which is most interesting (i.e. the sum of the cities' rateOfInterest). I'm thinking using some greedy algorithm, but is there any algorithm that can guarantee an optimal path?
EDIT Just as #robotking said, we allow visit places multiple times and it's only interesting the first visit. We have 50 cities, and each city approximately has 5 adjacent cities. The cost function on each edge is either time or distance. We don't have to visit all cities, just with the given cost function, we need to return an optimal partial trip with highest ROI. I hope this makes the problem clearer!
This sounds very much like an instance of a TSP in a weighted manner meaning there is some vertices that are more desirable than other...
Now you could find an optimal path trying every possible permutation (using backtracking with some pruning to make it faster) depending on the number of cities we are talking about. See the TSP problem is a n! problem so after n > 10 you can forget it...
If your number of cities is not that small then finding an optimal path won't be doable so drop the idea... however there is most likely a good enough heuristic algorithm to approximate a good enough solution.
Steven Skiena recommends "Simulated Annealing" as the heuristics of choice to approximate such hard problem. It is very much like a "Hill Climbing" method but in a more flexible or forgiving way. What I mean is that while in "Hill Climbing" you always only accept changes that improve your solution, in "Simulated Annealing" there is some cases where you actually accept a change even if it makes your solution worse locally hoping that down the road you get your money back...
Either way, whatever is used to approximate a TSP-like problem is applicable here.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem, note that the decision problem version is "(where, given a length L, the task is to decide whether any tour is shorter than L)". If somebody gives me a travelling salesman problem to solve I can set all the cities to have the same rate of interest and then the decision problem is whether a most interesting path for time L actually visits all the cities and returns.
So if there was an efficient solution for your problem there would be an efficient solution for the travelling salesman problem, which is unlikely.
If you want to go further than a greedy search, some of the approaches of the travelling salesman problem may be applicable - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.26.5150 describes "Iterated Local Search" which looks interesting, with reference to the TSP.
If you want optimality, use a brute force exhaustive search where the leaves are the one where the time run out. As long as the expected depth of the search tree is less than 10 and worst case less than 15 you can produce a practical algorithm.
Now if you think about the future and expect your city network to grow, then you cannot ensure optimality. In this case you are dealing with a local search problem.
Recently I've been looking at some greedy algorithm problems. I am confused about locally optimal. As you know, greedy algorithms are composed of locally optimal choices. But combining of locally optimal decisions doesn't necessarily mean globally optimal, right?
Take making change as an example: using the least number of coins to make 15¢, if we have
10¢, 5¢, and 1¢ coins then you can achieve this with one 10¢ and one 5¢. But if we add in a 12¢ coin the greedy algorithm fails as (1×12¢ + 3×1¢) uses more coins than (1×10¢ + 1×5¢).
Consider some classic greedy algorithms, e.g. Huffman, Dijkstra. In my opinion, these algorithms are successful as they have no degenerate cases which means a combination of locally optimal steps always equals global optimal. Do I understand right?
If my understanding is correct, is there a general method for checking if a greedy algorithm is optimal?
I found some discussion of greedy algorithms elsewhere on the site.
However, the problem doesn't go into too much detail.
Generally speaking, a locally optimal solution is always a global optimum whenever the problem is convex. This includes linear programming; quadratic programming with a positive definite objective; and non-linear programming with a convex objective function. (However, NLP problems tend to have a non-convex objective function.)
Heuristic search will give you a global optimum with locally optimum decisions if the heuristic function has certain properties. Consult an AI book for details on this.
In general, though, if the problem is not convex, I don't know of any methods for proving global optimality of a locally optimal solution.
There are some theorems that express problems for which greedy algorithms are optimal in terms of matroids (also:greedoids.) See this Wikipedia section for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroid#Greedy_algorithms
A greedy algorithm almost never succeeds in finding the optimal solution. In the cases that it does, this is highly dependent on the problem itself. As Ted Hopp explained, with convex curves, the global optimal can be found, assuming you are to find the maximum of the objective function of course (conversely, concave curves also work if you are to minimise). Otherwise, you will almost certainly get stuck in the local optima. This assumes that you already know the objective function.
Another factor which I can think of is the neighbourhood function. Certain neighbourhoods, if large enough, will encompass both the global and local maximas, so that you can avoid the local maxima. However, you can't make the neighbourhood too large or search will be slow.
In other words, whether you find a global optimal or not with greedy algorithms is problem specific, although for most cases, you will not find the globally optimal.
You need to design a witness example where your premise that the algorithm is a global one fails. Design it according to the algorithm and the problem.
Your example of the coin change was not a valid one. Coins are designed purposely to have all the combinations possible, but not to add confusion. Your addition of 12c is not warranted and is extra.
With your addition, the problem is not coin change but a different one (even though the subject are coins, you can change the example to what you want). For this, you yourself gave a witness example to show the greedy algorithm for this problem will get stuck in a local maximum.
What is the difference between a heuristic and an algorithm?
An algorithm is the description of an automated solution to a problem. What the algorithm does is precisely defined. The solution could or could not be the best possible one but you know from the start what kind of result you will get. You implement the algorithm using some programming language to get (a part of) a program.
Now, some problems are hard and you may not be able to get an acceptable solution in an acceptable time. In such cases you often can get a not too bad solution much faster, by applying some arbitrary choices (educated guesses): that's a heuristic.
A heuristic is still a kind of an algorithm, but one that will not explore all possible states of the problem, or will begin by exploring the most likely ones.
Typical examples are from games. When writing a chess game program you could imagine trying every possible move at some depth level and applying some evaluation function to the board. A heuristic would exclude full branches that begin with obviously bad moves.
In some cases you're not searching for the best solution, but for any solution fitting some constraint. A good heuristic would help to find a solution in a short time, but may also fail to find any if the only solutions are in the states it chose not to try.
An algorithm is typically deterministic and proven to yield an optimal result
A heuristic has no proof of correctness, often involves random elements, and may not yield optimal results.
Many problems for which no efficient algorithm to find an optimal solution is known have heuristic approaches that yield near-optimal results very quickly.
There are some overlaps: "genetic algorithms" is an accepted term, but strictly speaking, those are heuristics, not algorithms.
Heuristic, in a nutshell is an "Educated guess". Wikipedia explains it nicely. At the end, a "general acceptance" method is taken as an optimal solution to the specified problem.
Heuristic is an adjective for
experience-based techniques that help
in problem solving, learning and
discovery. A heuristic method is used
to rapidly come to a solution that is
hoped to be close to the best possible
answer, or 'optimal solution'.
Heuristics are "rules of thumb",
educated guesses, intuitive judgments
or simply common sense. A heuristic is
a general way of solving a problem.
Heuristics as a noun is another name
for heuristic methods.
In more precise terms, heuristics
stand for strategies using readily
accessible, though loosely applicable,
information to control problem solving
in human beings and machines.
While an algorithm is a method containing finite set of instructions used to solving a problem. The method has been proven mathematically or scientifically to work for the problem. There are formal methods and proofs.
Heuristic algorithm is an algorithm that is able to produce an
acceptable solution to a problem in
many practical scenarios, in the
fashion of a general heuristic, but
for which there is no formal proof of
its correctness.
An algorithm is a self-contained step-by-step set of operations to be performed 4, typically interpreted as a finite sequence of (computer or human) instructions to determine a solution to a problem such as: is there a path from A to B, or what is the smallest path between A and B. In the latter case, you could also be satisfied with a 'reasonably close' alternative solution.
There are certain categories of algorithms, of which the heuristic algorithm is one. Depending on the (proven) properties of the algorithm in this case, it falls into one of these three categories (note 1):
Exact: the solution is proven to be an optimal (or exact solution) to the input problem
Approximation: the deviation of the solution value is proven to be never further away from the optimal value than some pre-defined bound (for example, never more than 50% larger than the optimal value)
Heuristic: the algorithm has not been proven to be optimal, nor within a pre-defined bound of the optimal solution
Notice that an approximation algorithm is also a heuristic, but with the stronger property that there is a proven bound to the solution (value) it outputs.
For some problems, noone has ever found an 'efficient' algorithm to compute the optimal solutions (note 2). One of those problems is the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem. Christophides' algorithm for the Traveling Salesman Problem, for example, used to be called a heuristic, as it was not proven that it was within 50% of the optimal solution. Since it has been proven, however, Christophides' algorithm is more accurately referred to as an approximation algorithm.
Due to restrictions on what computers can do, it is not always possible to efficiently find the best solution possible. If there is enough structure in a problem, there may be an efficient way to traverse the solution space, even though the solution space is huge (i.e. in the shortest path problem).
Heuristics are typically applied to improve the running time of algorithms, by adding 'expert information' or 'educated guesses' to guide the search direction. In practice, a heuristic may also be a sub-routine for an optimal algorithm, to determine where to look first.
(note 1): Additionally, algorithms are characterised by whether they include random or non-deterministic elements. An algorithm that always executes the same way and produces the same answer, is called deterministic.
(note 2): This is called the P vs NP problem, and problems that are classified as NP-complete and NP-hard are unlikely to have an 'efficient' algorithm. Note; as #Kriss mentioned in the comments, there are even 'worse' types of problems, which may need exponential time or space to compute.
There are several answers that answer part of the question. I deemed them less complete and not accurate enough, and decided not to edit the accepted answer made by #Kriss
Actually I don't think that there is a lot in common between them. Some algorithm use heuristics in their logic (often to make fewer calculations or get faster results). Usually heuristics are used in the so called greedy algorithms.
Heuristics is some "knowledge" that we assume is good to use in order to get the best choice in our algorithm (when a choice should be taken). For example ... a heuristics in chess could be (always take the opponents' queen if you can, since you know this is the stronger figure). Heuristics do not guarantee you that will lead you to the correct answer, but (if the assumptions is correct) often get answer which are close to the best in much shorter time.
An Algorithm is a clearly defined set of instructions to solve a problem, Heuristics involve utilising an approach of learning and discovery to reach a solution.
So, if you know how to solve a problem then use an algorithm. If you need to develop a solution then it's heuristics.
Heuristics are algorithms, so in that sense there is none, however, heuristics take a 'guess' approach to problem solving, yielding a 'good enough' answer, rather than finding a 'best possible' solution.
A good example is where you have a very hard (read NP-complete) problem you want a solution for but don't have the time to arrive to it, so have to use a good enough solution based on a heuristic algorithm, such as finding a solution to a travelling salesman problem using a genetic algorithm.
Algorithm is a sequence of some operations that given an input computes something (a function) and outputs a result.
Algorithm may yield an exact or approximate values.
It also may compute a random value that is with high probability close to the exact value.
A heuristic algorithm uses some insight on input values and computes not exact value (but may be close to optimal).
In some special cases, heuristic can find exact solution.
A heuristic is usually an optimization or a strategy that usually provides a good enough answer, but not always and rarely the best answer. For example, if you were to solve the traveling salesman problem with brute force, discarding a partial solution once its cost exceeds that of the current best solution is a heuristic: sometimes it helps, other times it doesn't, and it definitely doesn't improve the theoretical (big-oh notation) run time of the algorithm
I think Heuristic is more of a constraint used in Learning Based Model in Artificial Intelligent since the future solution states are difficult to predict.
But then my doubt after reading above answers is
"How would Heuristic can be successfully applied using Stochastic Optimization Techniques? or can they function as full fledged algorithms when used with Stochastic Optimization?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_optimization
One of the best explanations I have read comes from the great book Code Complete, which I now quote:
A heuristic is a technique that helps you look for an answer. Its
results are subject to chance because a heuristic tells you only how
to look, not what to find. It doesn’t tell you how to get directly
from point A to point B; it might not even know where point A and
point B are. In effect, a heuristic is an algorithm in a clown suit.
It’s less predict- able, it’s more fun, and it comes without a 30-day,
money-back guarantee.
Here is an algorithm for driving to someone’s house: Take Highway 167
south to Puy-allup. Take the South Hill Mall exit and drive 4.5 miles
up the hill. Turn right at the light by the grocery store, and then
take the first left. Turn into the driveway of the large tan house on
the left, at 714 North Cedar.
Here’s a heuristic for getting to someone’s house: Find the last
letter we mailed you. Drive to the town in the return address. When
you get to town, ask someone where our house is. Everyone knows
us—someone will be glad to help you. If you can’t find anyone, call us
from a public phone, and we’ll come get you.
The difference between an algorithm and a heuristic is subtle, and the
two terms over-lap somewhat. For the purposes of this book, the main
difference between the two is the level of indirection from the
solution. An algorithm gives you the instructions directly. A
heuristic tells you how to discover the instructions for yourself, or
at least where to look for them.
They find a solution suboptimally without any guarantee as to the quality of solution found, it is obvious that it makes sense to the development of heuristics only polynomial. The application of these methods is suitable to solve real world problems or large problems so awkward from the computational point of view that for them there is not even an algorithm capable of finding an approximate solution in polynomial time.