A unifying approach to heuristic search

We present the General Search Procedure (GSP) that provides a unifying way of describing search algorithms. The GSP captures both constructive and iterative search algorithms. We demonstrate as an exercise that various well-known heuristic search procedures can be obtained as instances of the GSP. The introduced formalism provides a solid ground to prove theoretical properties of search methods. Furthermore, by the formal approach we obtain a framework that can serve as the basis of implementing a search based problem solver.

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