Chapter 02 · Section I · 14 min read
Search and problem solving
How a machine finds an answer it doesn't already have — illustrated with the simplest possible problem, getting from Thamel to Bhaktapur.
Most AI problems, at heart, are search problems. You have a starting state, a goal state, and a set of legal moves that take you from one state to another. The system’s job is to find a sequence of moves that gets it to the goal.
The simplest version of this is route-finding. You are in Thamel. You want to be in Bhaktapur. The “states” are intersections. The “moves” are roads. A search algorithm explores possible paths and returns the one that gets you there fastest.
This section is a stub. The full version will walk through breadth-first and depth-first search using the Kathmandu road network as the running example.