A general branch-and-bound formulation for and/or graph and game tree search

This paper presents a general procedure for finding an optimal solution tree of an acyclic AND/OR graph with monotone cost functions. Due to the relationship between AND/OR graphs and game trees, it can also be used as a game tree search procedure. Seemingly disparate procedures like AO*, SSS*, alpha-beta, B* are instantiations of this general procedure. This sheds new light on their interrelationships and nature, and simplifies their correctness proofs. Furthermore, the procedure is applicable to a very large class of problems, and thus provides a way of synthesizing algorithms for new applications. The procedure searches an AND/OR graph in a top-down manner (by selectively developing various potential solutions) and can be viewed as a general branch-and-bound procedure.

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