scholarly journals Scrubbing During Learning In Real-time Heuristic Search

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 ◽  
pp. 307-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan R. Sturtevant ◽  
Vadim Bulitko

Real-time agent-centered heuristic search is a well-studied problem where an agent that can only reason locally about the world must travel to a goal location using bounded computation and memory at each step. Many algorithms have been proposed for this problem and theoretical results have also been derived for the worst-case performance with simple examples demonstrating worst-case performance in practice. Lower bounds, however, have not been widely studied. In this paper we study best-case performance more generally and derive theoretical lower bounds for reaching the goal using LRTA*, a canonical example of a real-time agent-centered heuristic search algorithm. The results show that, given some reasonable restrictions on the state space and the heuristic function, the number of steps an LRTA*-like algorithm requires to reach the goal will grow asymptotically faster than the state space, resulting in ``scrubbing'' where the agent repeatedly visits the same state. We then show that while the asymptotic analysis does not hold for more complex real-time search algorithms, experimental results suggest that it is still descriptive of practical performance.

Author(s):  
Jingwei Chen ◽  
Robert C. Holte ◽  
Sandra Zilles ◽  
Nathan R. Sturtevant

It is well-known that any admissible unidirectional heuristic search algorithm must expand all states whose f-value is smaller than the optimal solution cost when using a consistent heuristic. Such states are called “surely expanded” (s.e.). A recent study characterized s.e. pairs of states for bidirectional search with consistent heuristics: if a pair of states is s.e. then at least one of the two states must be expanded. This paper derives a lower bound, VC, on the minimum number of expansions required to cover all s.e. pairs, and present a new admissible front-to-end bidirectional heuristic search algorithm, Near-Optimal Bidirectional Search (NBS), that is guaranteed to do no more than 2VC expansions. We further prove that no admissible front-to-end algorithm has a worst case better than 2VC. Experimental results show that NBS competes with or outperforms existing bidirectional search algorithms, and often outperforms A* as well.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Porto ◽  
André Silva ◽  
Sergo Almeida ◽  
Eduardo Da Costa ◽  
Sergio Bampi

This paper presents real time HDTV (High Definition Television) architecture for Motion Estimation (ME) using efficient adder compressors. The architecture is based on the Quarter Sub-sampled Diamond Search algorithm (QSDS) with Dynamic Iteration Control (DIC) algorithm. The main characteristic of the proposed architecture is the large amount of Processing Units (PUs) that are used to calculate the SAD (Sum of Absolute Difference) metric. The internal structures of the PUs are composed by a large number of addition operations to calculate the SADs. In this paper, efficient 4-2 and 8-2 adder compressors are used in the PUs architecture to achieve the performance to work with HDTV (High Definition Television) videos in real time at 30 frames per second. These adder compressors enable the simultaneous addition of 4 and 8 operands respectively. The PUs, using adder compressors, were applied to the ME architecture. The implemented architecture was described in VHDL and synthesized to FPGA and, with Leonardo Spectrum tool, to the TSMC 0.18μm CMOS standard cell technology. Synthesis results indicate that the new QSDS-DIC architecture reach the best performance result and enable gains of 12% in terms of processing rate. The architecture can reach real time for full HDTV (1920x1080 pixels) in the worst case processing 65 frames per second, and it can process 269 HDTV frames per second in the average case.


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