On transposition tables for single-agent search and planning: Summary of results

Abstract

Transposition tables are a well-known method for pruning duplicates in heuristic search. This paper presents a detailed analysis of transposition tables for IDA*. We show that some straightforward implementations of IDA* with transposition tables (IDA*+TT) can result in suboptimal solutions being returned. Furthermore, straightforward implementations of IDA*+TT are not complete. We identify several variants of IDA*+TT which are guaranteed to return the optimal solution, as well as a complete variant. An empirical study shows that IDA*+TT can significantly improve upon the performance of A* in domain-independent planning. Copyright © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.