Assignment

 

1. Refer to the 8-puzzle problem described below.
2. Suppose we want to add some knowledge to your blind search design to speed it up. 
   • What knowledge/information/heuristics will you add?  (I'm looking for a description of how you'll use outside knowledge of the problem to guide the search here.)
   • What kind of improvement do you expect to have with your heuristic? (Less states searched?  Better solution found?  Something else?) 
   • How much improvement do you expect to have?  A lot? A little? Why?
     
      

Purpose

This assignment is intended to help you learn to solve a problem with Blind Search.

The Problem

The "8-puzzle" (or "15-puzzle") is a "sliding tile" puzzle that you've probably seen one place or another. Here's the Wikipedia article on it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_puzzle).

Basically, you're given a 3x3 (or 4x4) grid of tiles, with tiles holding the numbers 1-8 (or 1-15), and one cell empty. 

Please find the attachment for the initial and final states

A "move" is to move a tile above, below, to the left, or to the right of the blank into the empty space (which makes space previously holding the tile now empty). 

Action Items

1. Suppose we want to develop an AI-based search system to solve the problem described above.  Answer the following questions about the design of the solution: 
   1. How will you represent a "state" in this system? 
   2. How will you represent an action in this system?  How does it generate a new state? 
   3. What is the (worst-case) branching factor for your design? 
   4. If we are using uninformed search to solve this, do you think Breadth-First Search or Depth-First Search will be better?  Why?  Is there anything you need to worry about? 
2. Submit your work by the due date.
   
   
   

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