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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
The Applied Artificial Intelligence Workshop
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In the first two sections, we learned how to define an intelligent agent and how to create a heuristic that guides the agent toward a desired state. We learned that this was not perfect because, at times, we ignored a few winning states in favor of a few losing states.
Now, we will learn about a structured and optimal approach so that we can execute a search for finding the shortest path between the current state and the goal state by using the A* ("A star" instead of "A asterisk") algorithm.
Have a look at the following figure:
Figure 1.13: Finding the shortest path in a maze
For a human, it is simple to find the shortest path by merely looking at the figure. We can conclude that there are two potential candidates for the shortest path: route one starts upward, and route two starts to the left. However, the AI does not know about these options. In fact, the most logical first step for a computer player...