Interactive Graph Search

We study \em interactive graph search (IGS), with the conceptual objective of departing from the conventional "top-down" strategy in searching a poly-hierarchy, a.k.a.\ a decision graph. In IGS, a machine assists a human in looking for a target node z in an acyclic directed graph G, by repetitively asking questions. In each \em question, the machine picks a node u in G, asks a human "is there a path from u to $z?"', and takes a boolean answer from the human. The efficiency goal is to locate z with as few questions as possible. We describe algorithms that solve the problem by asking a provably small number of questions, and establish lower bounds indicating that the algorithms are optimal up to a small additive factor. An experimental evaluation is presented to demonstrate the usefulness of our solutions in real-world scenarios.

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