Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python: Search Algorithms

[MUSIC] BRIAN YU: All right. Welcome, everyone, to an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python.

My name is Brian Yu. And in this class, we'll explore some of the ideas, and techniques, and algorithms that are at the foundation of artificial intelligence.

Now, artificial intelligence covers a wide variety of types of techniques. Anytime you see a computer do something that appears to be intelligent or rational in some way,

like recognizing someone's face in a photo, or being able to play a game better than people can, or being able to understand human language when we talk to our phones

and they understand what we mean and are able to respond back to us, these are all examples of AI, or artificial intelligence. And in this class we'll explore some of the ideas that make that AI possible.

So we'll begin our conversations with search. The problem of, we have an AI and we would like the AI to be able to search for solutions to some kind of problem,

no matter what that problem might be. Whether it's trying to get driving directions from point A to point B, or trying to figure out how to play a game,

giving a tic-tac-toe game, for example, figuring out what move it ought to make. After that, we'll take a look at knowledge.

Ideally, we want our AI to be able to know information, to be able to represent that information, and more importantly, to be able to draw inferences from that information.

To be able to use the information it knows and draw additional conclusions. So we'll talk about how AI can be programmed in order to do just that. Then we'll explore the topic of uncertainty.

Talking about ideas of, what happens if a computer isn't sure about a fact but maybe is only sure with a certain probability? So we'll talk about some of the ideas behind probability

and how computers can begin to deal with uncertain events in order to be a little bit more intelligent in that sense, as well. After that, we'll turn our attention to optimization.

Problems of when the computer is trying to optimize for some sort of goal, especially in a situation where there might be multiple ways that a computer might solve a problem,

but we're looking for a better way or, potentially, the best way if that's at all possible. Then we'll take a look at machine learning, or learning more generally.

In looking at how when we have access to data our computers can be programmed to be quite intelligent by learning from data and learning from experience, being able to perform a task better and better

based on greater access to data. So your email, for example, where your email inbox somehow knows which of your emails are good emails and whichever emails are spam.

These are all examples of computers being able to learn from past experiences and past data. We'll take a look, too, at how computers are able to draw inspiration

from human intelligence, looking at the structure of the human brain and how neural networks can be a computer analog to that sort of idea. And how, by taking advantage of a certain type of structure of a computer

program, we can write neural networks that are able to perform tasks very, very effectively. And then finally, we'll turn our attention to language.

Not programming languages, but human languages that we speak every day. And taking a look at the challenges that come about as a computer tries to understand natural language

and how it is some of the natural language processing that occurs in modern artificial intelligence can actually work.

But today it will begin our conversation with search. This problem of trying to figure out what to do when we have some sort of situation that the computer is in,

some sort of environment that an agent is in, so to speak. And we would like for that agent to be able to somehow look for a solution to that problem.

Now, these problems can come in any number of different types of formats. One example, for instance, might be something like this classic 15 puzzle with the sliding tiles that you might

have seen, where you're trying to slide the tiles in order to make sure that all the numbers line up in order. This is an example of what you might call a search problem.

The 15 puzzle begins in an initially mixed up state and we need some way of finding moves to make in order to return the puzzle to its solved state.

But there are similar problems that you can frame in other ways. Trying to find your way through a maze, for example, is another example of a search problem.

You begin in one place, you have some goal of where you're trying to get to, and you need to figure out the correct sequence of actions that will take you from that initial state to the goal.

And while this is a little bit abstract, anytime we talk about maze solving in this class, you can translate it to something a little more real world,

something like driving directions. If you ever wonder how Google Maps is able to figure out what is the best way for you to get from point A to point B

and what turns to make, at what time, depending on traffic, for example. It's often some sort of search algorithm. You have an AI that is trying to get from an initial position

to some sort of goal by taking some sequence of actions. So we'll start our conversations today by thinking about these types of search problems and what

goes in to solving a search problem like this in order for an AI to be able to find a good solution. In order to do so, though, we're going to need

to introduce a little bit of terminology, some of which I've already used. But the first time we'll need to think about is an agent.

An agent is just some entity that perceives its environment, it somehow is able to perceive the things around it, and act on that environment in some way.

So in the case of the driving directions, your agent might be some representation of a car that is trying to figure out what actions to take in order

to arrive at a destination. In the case of the 15 puzzle with the sliding tiles, the agent might be the AI or the person that is trying to solve that puzzle,

trying to figure out what tiles to move in order to get to that solution. Next, we introduce the idea of a state. A state is just some configuration of the agent in its environment.

So in the 15 puzzle, for example, any state might be any one of these three for example. A state is just some configuration of the tiles.

Each of these states is different and is going to require a slightly different solution. A different sequence of actions will be needed in each one of these in order

to get from this initial state to the goal, which is where we're trying to get. The initial state then.

What is that? The initial state is just the state where the agent begins. It is one such state where we're going to start from

and this is going to be the starting point for our search algorithm, so to speak. We're going to begin with this initial state

and then start to reason about it, to think about what actions might we apply to that initial state in order to figure out how to get from the beginning to the end, from the initial position to whatever our goal happens to be.

And how do we make our way from that initial position to the goal? Well ultimately, it's via taking actions. Actions are just choices that we can make in any given state.

And in AI, we're always going to try to formalize these ideas a little bit more precisely such that we could program them a little bit more mathematically, so to speak.

So this will be a recurring theme and we can more precisely define actions as a function. We're going to effectively define a function called actions

that takes an input S, where S is going to be some state that exists inside of our environment, and actions of S is going to take the state as input and return as output the set of all actions that

can be executed in that state. And so it's possible that some actions are only valid in certain states and not in other states.

And we'll see examples of that soon, too. So in the case of the 15 puzzle, for example, they're generally going to be four possible actions

that we can do most of the time. We can slide a tile to the right, slide a tile to the left, slide a tile up, or slide a tile down, for example.

And those are going to be the actions that are available to us. So somehow our AI, our program, needs some encoding of the state, which is often going to be in some numerical format,

and some encoding of these actions. But it also needs some encoding of the relationship between these things, how do the states and actions relate to one another?

And in order to do that, we'll introduce to our AI a transition model, which will be a description of what state we get after we perform some available action in some other state.

And again, we can be a little bit more precise about this, define this transition model a little bit more formally, again, as a function.

The function is going to be a function called result, that this time takes two inputs. Input number one is S, some state.

And input number two is A, some action. And the output of this function result is it is going to give us the state that we get after we perform action A in state

S. So let's take a look at an example to see more precisely what this actually means. Here's an example of a state of the 15 puzzle, for example.

And here's an example of an action, sliding a tile to the right. What happens if we pass these as inputs to the result function? Again, the result function takes this board, this state, as its first input.

And it takes an action as a second input. And of course, here, I'm describing things visually so that you can see visually what the state is and what the action is.

In a computer, you might represent one of these actions as just some number that represents the action. Or if you're familiar with enums that allow

you to enumerate multiple possibilities, it might be something like that. And the state might just be represented as an array, or two dimensional array, of all of these numbers that exist.

But here we're going to show it visually just so you can see it. When we take this state and this action, pass it into the result function, the output is a new state.

The state we get after we take a tile and slide it to the right, and this is the state we get as a result. If we had a different action and a different state, for example,

and passed that into the result function, we'd get a different answer altogether. So the result function needs to take care

of figuring out how to take a state and take an action and get what results. And this is going to be our transition model that describes how it is that states and actions are related to each other.

If we take this transition model and think about it more generally and across the entire problem, we can form what we might call a state space, the set of all of the states we can get from the initial state

via any sequence of actions, by taking zero or one or two or more actions in addition to that, so we could draw a diagram that looks something like this.

Where every state is represented here by a game board. And there are arrows that connect every state to every other state we can get two from that state.

And the state space is much larger than what you see just here. This is just a sample of what the state space might actually look like. And, in general, across many search problems,

whether they're this particular 15 puzzle or driving directions or something else, the state space is going to look something like this. We have individual states and arrows that are connecting them.

And oftentimes, just for simplicity, we'll simplify our representation of this entire thing as a graph, some sequence of nodes and edges that connect nodes.

But you can think of this more abstract representation as the exact same idea. Each of these little circles, or nodes, is going to represent one of the states inside of our problem.

And the arrows here represent the actions that we can take in any particular state, taking us from one particular state to another state, for example.

All right. So now we have this idea of nodes that are representing these states, actions that can take us from one state to another,

and a transition model that defines what happens after we take a particular action. So the next step we need to figure out is

how we know when the AI is done solving the problem. The AI I needs some way to know when it gets to the goal, that it's found the goal.

So the next thing we'll need to encode into our artificial intelligence is a goal test, some way to determine whether a given state is a goal state. In the case of something like driving directions, it might be pretty easy.

If you're in a state that corresponds to whatever the user typed in as their intended destination, well, then you know you're in a goal state.

In the 15 puzzle, it might be checking the numbers to make sure they're all in ascending order. But the AI need some way to encode whether or not

any state they happen to be in is a goal. And some problems might have one goal, like a maze where you have one initial position and one ending position

and that's the goal. In other more complex problems, you might imagine that there are multiple possible goals, that there are multiple ways

to solve a problem. And we might not care which one the computer finds as long as it does find a particular goal.

However, sometimes a computer doesn't just care about finding a goal, but finding a goal well, or one with a low cost. And it's for that reason that the last piece

of terminology that we use to define these search problems is something called a path cost. You might imagine that in the case of driving directions,

it would be pretty annoying if I said I wanted directions from point A to point B, and the route the Google Maps gave me was a long route with lots of detours that were unnecessary, that took longer than it should

have for me to get to that destination. And it's for that reason that when we're formulating search problems, we'll often give every path some sort of numerical cost, some number telling us

how expensive it is to take this particular option. And then tell our AI that instead of just finding a solution, some way of getting from the initial state to the goal,

we'd really like to find one that minimizes this path cost, that is less expensive, or takes less time, or minimizes some other numerical value.

We can represent this graphically, if we take a look at this graph again. And imagine that each of these arrows, each of these actions that we can take from one state to another state,

has some sort of number associated with it, that number being the path cost of this particular action where some of the costs for any particular action

might be more expensive than the cost for some other action, for example. Although this will only happen in some sorts of problems. In other problems we can simplify the diagram

and just assume that the cost of any particular action is the same. And this is probably the case in something like the 15 puzzle, for example, where it doesn't really make a difference whether I'm

moving right or moving left. The only thing that matters is the total number of steps that I have to take to get from point A to point B. And each of those steps

is of equal cost. We can just assume it's a some constant cost, like one. And so this now forms the basis for what we

might consider to be a search problem. A search problem has some sort of initial state, some place where we begin, some sort of action that we can take

or multiple actions that we can take in any given state, and it has a transition model, some way of defining what happens when we go from one state and take one action,

what state do we end up with as a result. In addition to that, we need some goal test to know whether or not we've reached a goal.

And then we need a path cost function that tells us for any particular path, by following some sequence of actions, how expensive is that path. What is its cost in terms of money, or time,

or some other resource that we are trying to minimize our usage of. The goal, ultimately, is to find a solution, where a solution in this case is just some sequence of actions that will take us from the initial state

to the goal state. And, ideally, we'd like to find not just any solution, but the optimal solution, which is a solution that has the lowest path cost among all

of the possible solutions. And in some cases, there might be multiple optimal solutions, but an optimal solution just means that there

is no way that we could have done better in terms of finding that solution. So now we've defined the problem. And now we need to begin to figure out how

it is that we're going to solve this kind of search problem. And in order to do so, you'll probably imagine that our computer is going to need to represent a whole bunch of data

about this particular problem. We need to represent data about where we are in the problem. And we might need to be considering multiple different options at once.

And oftentimes when we're trying to package a whole bunch of data related to a state together, we'll do so using a data structure that we're going to call a node.

A node is a data structure that is just going to keep track of a variety of different values, and specifically in the case of a search problem,

it's going to keep track of these four values in particular. Every node is going to keep track of a state, the state we're currently on. And every node is also going to keep track of a parent.

A parent being the state before us, or the node that we used in order to get to this current state. And this is going to be relevant because eventually,

once we reach the goal node, once we get to the end, we want to know what sequence of actions we used in order to get to that goal. And the way we'll know that is by looking at these parents

to keep track of what led us to the goal, and what led us to that state, and what led us to the state before that, so on and so forth, backtracking our way to the beginning so that we

know the entire sequence of actions we needed in order to get from the beginning to the end. The node is also going to keep track of what action we took in order to get

from the parent to the current state. And the node is also going to keep track of a path cost. In other words, it's going to keep track of the number that

represents how long it took to get from the initial state to the state that we currently happen to be at. And we'll see why this is relevant as we start to talk about some

of the optimizations that we can make in terms of these search problems more generally. So this is the data structure that we're going

to use in order to solve the problem. And now let's talk about the approach, how might we actually begin to solve the problem?

Well, as you might imagine, what we're going to do is we're going to start at one particular state and we're just going to explore from there.

The intuition is that from a given state, we have multiple options that we could take, and we're going to explore those options.

And once we explore those options, we'll find that more options than that are going to make themselves available. And we're going to consider all of the available options

to be stored inside of a single data structure that we'll call the frontier. The frontier is going to represent all of the things that we could explore next, that we haven't yet explored or visited.

So in our approach, we're going to begin this search algorithm by starting with a frontier that just contains one state. The frontier is going to contain the initial state because at the beginning,

that's the only state we know about. That is the only state that exists. And then our search algorithm is effectively going to follow a loop.

We're going to repeat some process again and again and again. The first thing we're going to do is if the frontier is empty, then there's no solution.

And we can report that there is no way to get to the goal. And that's certainly possible. There are certain types of problems that an AI might

try to explore and realize that there is no way to solve that problem. And that's useful information for humans to know, as well. So if ever the frontier is empty, that means there's nothing left to explore,

and we haven't yet found a solution so there is no solution. There's nothing left to explore. Otherwise what we'll do is we'll remove a node from the frontier.

So right now at the beginning, the frontier just contains one node representing the initial state. But over time, the frontier might grow.

It might contain multiple states. And so here we're just going to remove a single node from that frontier. If that node happens to be a goal, then we found a solution.

So we remove a node from the frontier and ask ourselves, is this the goal? And we do that by applying the goal test that we talked about earlier, asking if we're at the destination or asking if all the numbers of the 15

puzzle happen to be in order. So if the node contains the goal, we found a solution. Great.

We're done. And otherwise, what we'll need to do is we'll need to expand the node. And this is a term in artificial intelligence.

To expand the node just means to look at all of the neighbors of that node. In other words, consider all of the possible actions that I could take from the state that this node as representing

and what nodes could I get to from there. We're going to take all of those nodes, the next nodes that I can get to from this current one I'm looking at,

and add those to the frontier. And then we'll repeat this process. So at a very high level, the idea is we start with a frontier that

contains the initial state. And we're constantly removing a node from the frontier, looking at where we can get to next, and adding those nodes to the frontier,

repeating this process over and over until either we remove a node from the frontier and it contains a goal, meaning we've solved the problem.

Or we run into a situation where the frontier is empty, at which point we're left with no solution. So let's actually try and take the pseudocode,

put it into practice by taking a look at an example of a sample search problem. So right here I have a sample graph. A is connected to B via this action, B is connected to node C and D, C

is connected to D, E is connected to F. And what I'd like to do is have my AI find a path from A to E. We want to get from this initial state to this goal state.

So how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to start with the frontier that contains the initial state.

This is going to represent our frontier. So our frontier, initially, will just contain A, that initial state where we're going to begin.

And now we'll repeat this process. If the frontier is empty, no solution. That's not a problem because the frontier is not empty.

So we'll remove a node from the frontier as the one to consider next. There is only one node in the frontier. So we'll go ahead and remove it from the frontier.

But now A, this initial node, this is the node we're currently considering. We follow the next step. We ask ourselves, is this node the goal?

No, it's not. A is not the goal. E is the goal.

So we don't return the solution. So instead, we go to this last step, expand the node and add the resulting nodes to the frontier.

What does that mean? Well, it means take this state A and consider where we could get to next. And after A what we could get to next is only

B. So that's what we get when we expand A. We find B. And we add B to the frontier. And now B is in the frontier and we repeat the process again.

We say, all right. The frontier is not empty. So let's remove B from the frontier.

B is now the node that we're considering. We ask ourselves, is B the goal? No, it's not.

So we go ahead and expand B and add its resulting nodes to the frontier. What happens when we expand B? In other words, what nodes can we get to from B?

Well, we can get to C and D. So we'll go ahead and add C and D from the frontier. And now we have two nodes in the frontier, C and D.

And we repeat the process again. We remove a node from the frontier, for now we'll do so arbitrarily just by picking C.

We'll see why later how choosing which node you remove from the frontier is actually quite an important part of the algorithm. But for now I'll arbitrarily remove C, say it's not the goal,

so we'll add E, the next one to the frontier. Then let's say I remove E from the frontier. And now I'm currently looking at state E. Is that a goal state?

It is because I'm trying to find a path from A to E. So I would return the goal. And that, now, would be the solution, that I'm now

able to return the solution and I found a path from A to E. So this is the general idea, the general approach of this search algorithm, to follow these steps constantly removing nodes from the frontier

until we're able to find a solution. So the next question you might reasonably ask is, what could go wrong here?

What are the potential problems with an approach like this? And here's one example of a problem that could arise from this sort of approach. Imagine this same graph, same as before, with one change.

The change being, now, instead of just an arrow from A to B, we also have an arrow from B to A, meaning we can go in both directions. And this is true in something like the 15 puzzle

where when I slide a tile to the right, I could then slide a tile to the left to get back to the original position. I could go back and forth between A and B.

And that's what these double arrows symbolize, the idea that from one state I can get to another and then I can get back. And that's true in many search problems.

What's going to happen if I try to apply the same approach now? Well, I'll begin with A, same as before. And I'll remove A from the frontier.

And then I'll consider where I can get to from A. And after A, the only place I can get choice B so B goes into the frontier. Then I'll say, all right.

Let's take a look at B. That's the only thing left in the frontier. Where can I get to from B? Before it was just C and D, but now because of that reverse arrow,

I can get to A or C or D. So all three A, C, and D. All of those now go into the frontier. They are places I can get to from B. And now I remove one from the frontier,

and, you know, maybe I'm unlucky and maybe I pick A. And now I'm looking at A again. And I consider where can I get to from A. And from A, well I can get to B.

And now we start to see the problem, that if I'm not careful, I go from A to B and then back to A and then to B again. And I could be going in this infinite loop where I never

make any progress because I'm constantly just going back and forth between two states that I've already seen. So what is the solution to this?

We need some way to deal with this problem. And the way that we can deal with this problem is by somehow keeping track of what we've already explored.

And the logic is going to be, well, if we've already explored the state, there's no reason to go back to it. Once we've explored a state, don't go back to it,

don't bother adding it to the frontier. There's no need to. So here is going to be our revised approach,

a better way to approach this sort of search problem. And it's going to look very similar just with a couple of modifications. We'll start with a frontier that contains the initial state.

Same as before. But now we'll start with another data structure, which would just be a set of nodes that we've already explored.

So what are the states we've explored? Initially, it's empty. We have an empty explored set.

And now we repeat. If the frontier is empty, no solution. Same as before.

We remove a node from the frontier, we check to see if it's a goal state, return the solution. None of this is any different so far.

But now, what we're going to do is we're going to add the node to the explored state. So if it happens to be the case that we remove a node from the frontier

and it's not the goal, we'll add it to the explored set so that we know we've already explored it. We don't need to go back to it again if it happens to come up later.

And then the final step, we expand the node and we add the resulting nodes to the frontier. But before we just always added the resulting nodes to the frontier,

we're going to be a little cleverer about it this time. We're only going to add the nodes to the frontier if they aren't already in the frontier and if they

aren't already in the explored set. So we'll check both the frontier and the explored set, make sure that the node isn't already in one of those two,

and so long as it isn't, then we'll go ahead and add to the frontier but not otherwise. And so that revised approach is ultimately

what's going to help make sure that we don't go back and forth between two nodes. Now the one point that I've kind of glossed over here

so far is this step here, removing a node from the frontier. Before I just chose arbitrarily, like let's just remove a node and that's it. But it turns out it's actually quite important

how we decide to structure our frontier, how we add them, and how we remove our nodes. The frontier is a data structure.

And we need to make a choice about in what order are we going to be removing elements? And one of the simplest data structures for adding and removing elements

is something called a stack. And a stack is a data structure that is a last in, first out data type. Which means the last thing that I add to the frontier

is going to be the first thing that I remove from the frontier. So the most recent thing to go into the stack, or the frontier in this case, is going to be the node that I explore.

So let's see what happens if I apply this stack based approach to something like this problem, finding a path from A to E. What's going to happen?

Well, again we'll start with A. And we'll say, all right. Let's go ahead and look at A first. And then, notice this time, we've added A to the explored set.

A is something we've now explored, we have this data structure that's keeping track. We then say from A we can get to B. And all right.

From B what can we do? Well from B, we can explore B and get to both C and D. So we added C and then D. So now when we explore a node,

we're going to treat the frontier as a stack, last in, first out. D was the last one to come in so we'll go ahead and explore that next. And say, all right, where can we get to from D?

Well we can get to F. And so, all right. We'll put F into the frontier. And now because the frontier is a stack, F

is the most recent thing that's gone in the stack. So F is what we'll explore next. We'll explore F and say, all right.

Where can we get you from F? Well, we can't get anywhere so nothing gets added to the frontier. So now what was the new most recent thing added to the frontier?

Well it's not C, the only thing left in the frontier. We'll explore that from which we can say, all right, from C we can get to E. So E goes into the frontier.

And then we say, all right. Let's look at E and E is now the solution. And now we've solved the problem.

So when we treat the frontier like a stack, a last in, first out data structure, that's the result we get. We go from A to B to D to F, and then we sort of backed up and went down

to C and then E. And it's important to get a visual sense for how this algorithm is working. We went very deep in this search tree, so

to speak, all the way until the bottom where we hit a dead end. And then we effectively backed up and explored this other route that we didn't try before.

And it's this going very deep in the search tree idea, this way the algorithm ends up working when we use a stack, that we call this version of the algorithm depth first search.

Depth first search is the search algorithm where we always explore the deepest node in the frontier. We keep going deeper and deeper through our search tree.

And then if we hit a dead end, we back up and we try something else instead. But depth first search is just one of the possible search options that we could use.

It turns out that there is another algorithm called breadth first search, which behaves very similarly to depth first search with one difference.

Instead of always exploring the deepest node in the search tree the way the depth first search does, breadth first search is always going to explore the shallowest node in the frontier.

So what does that mean? Well, it means that instead of using a stack, which depth first search, or DFS, used where the most recent item added

to the frontier is the one we'll explore next, in breadth first search, or BFS, will instead use a queue where a queue is a first in, first out data type, where the very first thing we add to the frontier is the first one

we'll explore. And they effectively form a line or a queue, where the earlier you arrive in the frontier, the earlier you get explored.

So what would that mean for the same exact problem finding a path from A to E? Well we start with A, same as before.

Then we'll go ahead and have explored A, and say, where can we get to from A? Well, from A we can get to B. Same as before. From B, same as before.

We can get to C and D so C and D get added to the frontier. This time, though, we added C to the frontier before D so we'll explore C first.

So C gets explored. And from C, where can we get to? Well, we can get to E.

So E gets added to the frontier. But because D was explored before E, we'll look at D next. So we'll explore D and say, where can we get to from D?

We can get to F. And only then will we say, all right. Now we can get to E. And so what breadth first search, or BFS, did is we started here, we looked at both C and D,

and then we looked at E. Effectively we're looking at things one away from the initial state, then two away from the initial state.

And only then, things that are three away from the initial state. Unlike depth first search, which just went as deep as possible into the search tree until it hit a dead end and then,

ultimately, had to back up. So these now are two different search algorithms that we could apply in order to try and solve a problem.

And let's take a look at how these would actually work in practice with something like maze solving, for example. So here's an example of a maze.

These empty cells represent places where our agent can move. These darkened gray cells and represent walls that the agent can't pass through.

And, ultimately, our agent, our AI, is going to try to find a way to get from position A to position B via some sequence of actions, where those actions are left,

right, up, and down. What will depth first search do in this case? Well depth first search will just follow one path.

If it reaches a fork in the road where it has multiple different options, depth first search is just, in this case, going to choose one. There isn't a real preference.

But it's going to keep following one until it hits a dead end. And when it hits a dead end, depth first search effectively goes back to the last decision point

and tries the other path. Fully exhausting this entire path and when it realizes that, OK, the goal is not here,

then it turns its attention to this path. It goes as deep as possible. When it hits a dead end, it backs up and then tries this other path,

keeps going as deep as possible down one particular path, and when it realizes that that's a dead end, then it'll back up. And then ultimately find its way to the goal.

And maybe you got lucky and maybe you made a different choice earlier on, but ultimately this is how depth first search is going to work. It's going to keep following until it hits a dead end.

And when it hits a dead end, it backs up and looks for a different solution. And so one thing you might reasonably ask is, is this algorithm always going to work?

Will it always actually find a way to get from the initial state to the goal? And it turns out that as long as our maze is finite, as long as they're that finitely many spaces where

we can travel, then yes. Depth first search is going to find a solution because eventually it will just explore everything.

If the maze happens to be infinite and there's an infinite state space, which does exist in certain types of problems, then it's a slightly different story. But as long as our maze has finitely many squares,

we're going to find a solution. The next question, though, that we want to ask is, is it going to be a good solution?

Is it the optimal solution that we can find? And the answer there is not necessarily. And let's take a look at an example of that.

In this maze, for example, we're again trying to find our way from A to B. And you notice here there are multiple possible solutions. We could go this way, or we could go up in order

to make our way from A to B. Now if we're lucky, depth first search will choose this way and get to B. But there's no reason, necessarily, why depth first search would choose

between going up or going to the right. It's sort of an arbitrary decision point because both are going to be added to the frontier.

And ultimately, if we get unlucky, depth first search might choose to explore this path first because it's just a random choice at this point.

It will explore, explore, explore, and it'll eventually find the goal, this particular path, when in actuality there was a better path.

There was a more optimal solution that used fewer steps, assuming we're measuring the cost of a solution based on the number of steps that we need to take.

So depth first search, if we're unlucky, might end up not finding the best solution when a better solution is available. So if that's DFS, depth first search.

How does BFS, or breadth first search, compare? How would it work in this particular situation? Well the algorithm is going to look very different visually

in terms of how BFS explores. Because BFS looks at shallower nodes first, the idea is going to be BFS will first look at all of the nodes that

are one away from the initial state. Look here and look here, for example. Just at the two nodes that are immediately next to this initial state.

Then it will explore nodes that are two away, looking at the state and that state, for example. Then it will explore nodes that are three away, this state and that state.

Whereas depth first search just picked one path and kept following it, breadth first search on the other hand, is taking the option of exploring all of the possible paths

kind of at the same time, bouncing back between them, looking deeper and deeper at each one, but making sure to explore the shallower ones or the ones that are

closer to the initial state earlier. So we'll keep following this pattern, looking at things that are four away, looking at things that are five away, looking

at things that are six away, until eventually we make our way to the goal. And in this case, it's true we had to explore some states that ultimately didn't lead us anywhere.

But the path that we found to the goal was the optimal path. This is the shortest way that we could get to the goal. And so, what might happen then in a larger maze?

Well let's take a look at something like this and how breadth first search is going to behave. Well, breadth first search, again, will just

keep following the states until it receives a decision point. It could go either left or right. And while DFS just picked one and kept following

that until it hit a dead end, BFS on the other hand, will explore both. It'll say, look at this node, then this node, and I'll look at this node, then that node, so on and so forth.

And when it hits a decision point here, rather than pick one left or two right and explore that path, it will again explore both alternating between them, going deeper and deeper.

Will explore here, and then maybe here and here, and then keep going. Explore here and slowly make our way, you can visually see further and further out.

Once we get to this decision point, we'll explore both up and down until, ultimately, we make our way to the goal.

And what you'll notice is, yes, breadth first search did find our way from A to B by following this particular path. But it needed to explore a lot of states in order to do so.

And so we see some trade here between DFS and BFS. That in DFS there may be some cases where there is some memory savings, as compared to a breadth first approach where

breadth first search, in this case, had to explore a lot of states. But maybe that won't always be the case. So now let's actually turn our attention to some code.

And look at the code that we could actually write in order to implement something like depth first search or breadth for the search in the context of solving a maze, for example.

So I'll go ahead and go into my terminal. And what I have here inside of maze.pi is an implementation of this same idea of maze solving.

I've defined a class called node that in this case is keeping track of the state, the parent, in other words the state before the state, and the action.

In this case, we're not keeping track of the path cost because we can calculate the cost of the path at the end after we found our way from the initial state to the goal.

In addition to this, I've defined a class called a stack frontier. And if unfamiliar with a class, a class is a way for me to define a way to generate objects in Python.

It refers to an idea of object oriented programming where the idea here is that I would like to create an object that is able to store all of my Frontier Data.

And I would like to have functions, otherwise known as methods on that object, that I can use to manipulate the object. And so what's going on here, if unfamiliar with the syntax,

is I have a function that initially creates a frontier that I'm going to represent using a list. And initially my frontier is represented by the empty list.

There's nothing in my frontier to begin with. I have an add function that adds something to the frontier, as by appending it to the end of the list.

I have a function that checks if the frontier contains a particular state. I have an empty function that checks if the frontier is empty. If the frontier is empty, that just means the length of the frontier

is zero. And then I have a function for removing something from the frontier. I can't remove something from the frontier if the frontier is empty.

So I check for that first. But otherwise, if the frontier isn't empty, recall that I'm implementing this frontier as a stack,

a last in, first out data structure. Which means the last thing I add to the frontier, in other words, the last thing in the list,

is the item that I should remove from this frontier. So what you'll see here is I have removed the last item of a list. And if you index into a Python list with negative one,

that gets you the last item in the list. Since zero is the first item, negative one kind of wraps around and gets you to the last item in the list.

So we give that the node. We call that node, we update the frontier here on line 28 to say, go ahead and remove that node that you just removed from the frontier.

And then we return the node as a result. So this class here effectively implements the idea of a frontier. It gives me a way to add something to a frontier and a way

to remove something from the frontier as a stack. I've also, just for good measure, implemented an alternative version of the same thing called a Q frontier.

Which, in parentheses you'll see here, it inherits from a stack frontier, meaning it's going to do all the same things that the stack frontier did, except the way we remove a node from the frontier

is going to be slightly different. Instead of removing from the end of the list the way we would in a stack, we're instead going to remove from the beginning of the list.

self.frontierzero will get me the first node in the frontier, the first one that was added. And that is going to be the one that we return in the case of a Q.

Under here I have a definition of a class called maze. This is going to handle the process of taking a sequence, a maze like text file, and figuring out how to solve it.

So we'll take as input a text file that looks something like this, for example, where we see hash marks that are here representing walls and I have the character A representing the starting position,

and the character B representing the ending position. And you can take a look at the code for parsing this text file right now. That's the less interesting part.

The more interesting part is this solve function here, where the solve function is going to figure out how to actually get from point A to point B.

And here we see an implementation of the exact same idea we saw from a moment ago. We're going to keep track of how many states

we've explored just so we can report that data later. But I start with a node that represents just the start state. And I start with a frontier that in this case is a stack frontier.

And given that I'm treating my frontier as a stack, you might imagine that the algorithm I'm using here is now depth first search. Because depth first search or DFS uses a stack as its data structure.

And initially, this frontier is just going to contain the start state. We initialize an explored set that initially is empty. There's nothing we've explored so far.

And now here's our loop, that notion of repeating something again and again. First, we check if the frontier is empty by calling that empty function that we saw the implementation of a moment ago.

And if the frontier is indeed empty, we'll go ahead and raise an exception, or a Python error, to say, sorry. There is no solution to this problem.

Otherwise, we'll go ahead and remove a node from the frontier, as by calling frontier.remove and update the number of states we've explored. Because now we've explored one additional state

so we say self.numexplored plus equals one, adding one to the number of states we've explored. Once we remove a node from the frontier, recall

that the next step is to see whether or not it's the goal, the goal test. And in the case of the maze, the goal is pretty easy. I check to see whether the state of the node is equal to the goal.

Initially when I set up the maze, I set up this value called goal which is the property of the maze so I can just check to see if the node is actually the goal.

And if it is the goal, then what I want to do is backtrack my way towards figuring out what actions I took in order to get to this goal.

And how do I do that? We'll recall that every node stores its parent-- the node that came before it that we used to get to this node--

and also the action used in order to get there. So I can create this loop where I'm constantly just looking at the parent of every node and keeping

track, for all of the parents, what action I took to get from the parent to this. So this loop is going to keep repeating this process of looking through all

of the parent nodes until we get back to the initial state, which has no parent, where node.parent is going to be equal to none. As I do so, I'm going to be building up the list of all

of the actions that I'm following and the list of all of the cells that are part of the solution. But I'll reverse them because when I build it

up going from the goal back to the initial state, I'm building the sequence of actions from the goal to the initial state, but I want to reverse them in order to get the sequence of actions

from the initial state to the goal. And that is, ultimately, going to be the solution. So all of that happens if the current state is equal to the goal.

And otherwise, if it's not the goal, well, then I'll go ahead and add this state to the explored set to say, I've explored this state now.

No need to go back to it if I come across it in the future. And then, this logic here implements the idea of adding neighbors to the frontier.

I'm saying, look at all of my neighbors. And I implemented a function called neighbors that you can take a look at. And for each of those neighbors, I'm going to check,

is the state already in the frontier? Is the state already in the explored set? And if it's not in either of those, then I'll go ahead and add this new child

node-- this new node-- to the frontier. So there's a fair amount of syntax here, but the key here

is not to understand all the nuances of the syntax, though feel free to take a closer look at this file on your own to get a sense for how it is working.

But the key is to see how this is an implementation of the same pseudocode, the same idea that we were describing a moment ago on the screen when we were looking at the steps that we might follow in order

to solve this kind of search problem. So now let's actually see this in action. I'll go ahead and run maze.py on maze1.txt, for example.

And what we'll see is here we have a printout of what the maze initially looked like. And then here, down below, is after we've solved it.

We had to explore 11 states in order to do it, and we found a path from A to B. And in this program, I just happened to generate a graphical representation of this, as well--

so I can open up maze.png, which is generated by this program-- that shows you where, in the darker color here, the wall is. Red is the initial state, green is the goal,

and yellow is the path that was followed. We found a path from the initial state to the goal. But now let's take a look at a more sophisticated maze

to see what might happen instead. Let's look now at maze2.txt, where now here we have a much larger maze. Again, we're trying to find our way from point A to point B,

but now you'll imagine that depth-first search might not be so lucky. It might not get the goal on the first try. It might have to follow one path then backtrack

and explore something else a little bit later. So let's try this. Run pythonmaze.py of maze2.txt, this time trying on this other maze.

And now depth-first search is able to find a solution. Here, as indicated by the stars, is a way to get from A to B. And we can represent this visually by opening up this maze.

Here's what that maze looks like. And highlighted in yellow, is the path that was found from the initial state to the goal.

But how many states do we have to explore before we found that path? Well, recall that, in my program, I was keeping track of the number of states that we've explored so far.

And so I can go back to the terminal and see that, all right, in order to solve this problem, we had to explore 399 different states. And in fact, if I make one small modification to the program

and tell the program at the end when we output this image, I added an argument called "show explored". And if I set "show explored" equal to true

and rerun this program pythonmaze.py by running it on maze2, and then I open the maze, what you'll see here is, highlighted in red, are all of the states that had to be explored to get from the initial state

to the goal. Depth-First Search, or DFS, didn't find its way to the goal right away. It made a choice to first explore this direction.

And when it explored this direction, it had to follow every conceivable path, all the way to the very end, even this long and winding one,

in order to realize that, you know what, that's a dead end. And instead, the program needed to backtrack. After going this direction, it must have gone this direction.

It got lucky here by just not choosing this path. But it got unlucky here, exploring this direction, exploring a bunch of states that it didn't need to and then, likewise,

exploring all of this top part of the graph when it probably didn't need to do that either. So all in all, depth-first search here really

not performing optimally, or probably exploring more states than it needs to. It finds an optimal solution, the best path to the goal, but the number of states needed to explore in order to do so,

the number of steps I had to take, that was much higher. So let's compare. How would Breadth-First Search, or BFS, do on this exact same maze instead?

And in order to do so, it's a very easy change. The algorithm for DFS and BFS is identical with the exception of what data structure we use to represent the frontier.

That in DFS I used a stack frontier-- last in, first out-- whereas in BFS, I'm going to use a queue frontier-- first in,

first out, where the first thing I add to the frontier is the first thing that I remove. So I'll go back to the terminal, rerun this program on the same maze,

and now you'll see that the number of states we had to explore was only 77, as compared to almost 400 when we used depth-first search. And we can see exactly why.

We can see what happened if we open up maze.png now and take a look. Again, yellow highlight is the solution that breath-first search found, which, incidentally, is the same solution that depth-first search found.

They're both finding the best solution, but notice all the white unexplored cells. There was much fewer states that needed to be explored

in order to make our way to the goal because breadth-first search operates a little more shallowly. It's exploring things that are close to the initial state

without exploring things that are further away. So if the goal is not too far away, then breadth-first search can actually behave quite effectively on a maze that

looks a little something like this. Now, in this case, both BFS and DFS ended up finding the same solution, but that won't always be the case.

And in fact, let's take a look at one more example, for instance, maze3.txt. In maze3.txt, notice that here there are multiple ways that you could get from A to B.

It's a relatively small maze, but let's look at what happens. If I use-- and I'll go ahead and turn off "show explored" so we just see the solution.

If I use BFS, breadth-first search, to solve maze3.txt, well, then we find a solution. And if I open up the maze, here's the solution that we found.

It is the optimal one. With just four steps, we can get from the initial state to what the goal happens to be.

But what happens if we try to use, depth-first search, or DFS, instead? Well, again, I'll go back up to my queue frontier, where queue frontier means that we're using breadth-first search.

And I'll change it to a stack frontier, which means that now we'll be using depth-first search. I'll rerun Pythonmaze.py.

And now you'll see that we find a solution, but it is not the optimal solution. This, instead, is what our algorithm finds.

And maybe depth-first search would have found this solution. It's possible, but it's not guaranteed, that if we just happen to be unlucky, if we choose this state instead of that state,

then depth-first search might find a longer route to get from the initial state to the goal. So we do see some trade-offs here where depth-first search might not

find the optimal solution. So at that point, it seems like breadth-first search is pretty good. Is that the best we can do, where it's going to find us the optimal solution

and we don't have to worry about situations where we might end up finding a longer path to the solution than what actually exists? Where the goal is far away from the initial state--

and we might have to take lots of steps in order to get from the initial state to the goal-- what ended up happening, is that this algorithm, BFS, ended up

exploring basically the entire graph, having to go through the entire maze in order to find its way from the initial state to the goal state. What we'd ultimately like is for our algorithm

to be a little bit more intelligent. And now what would it mean for our algorithm to be a little bit more intelligent, in this case?

Well, let's look back to where breadth-first search might have been able to make a different decision and consider human intuition in this process, as well.

Like, what might a human do when solving this maze that is different than what BFS ultimately chose to do? Well, the very first decision point that BFS made

was right here, when it made five steps and ended up in a position where it had a fork in the road. It could either go left or it could go right.

In these initial couple of steps, there was no choice. There was only one action that could be taken from each of those states. And so the search algorithm did the only thing

that any search algorithm could do, which is keep following that state after the next state. But this decision point is where things get a little bit interesting.

Depth-first search, that very first search algorithm we looked at, chose to say, let's pick one path and exhaust that path, see if anything that way has the goal, and if not, then let's

try the other way. Breadth-first search took the alternative approach of saying, you know what?

Let's explore things that are shallow, close to us first, look left and right, then back left and back right, so on and so forth, alternating between our options in the hopes of finding something nearby.

But ultimately, what might a human do if confronted with a situation like this of go left or go right? Well, a human might visually see that, all right,

I'm trying to get to state B, which is way up there, and going right just feels like it's closer to the goal. Like, it feels like going right should be

better than going left because I'm making progress towards getting to that goal. Now, of course, there are a couple of assumptions that I'm making here.

I'm making the assumption that we can represent this grid as, like, a two-dimensional grid, where I know the coordinates of everything.

I know that A is in coordinate 0,0, and B is in some other coordinate pair. And I know what coordinate I'm at now, so I can calculate that, yeah, going this way, that is closer to the goal.

And that might be a reasonable assumption for some types of search problems but maybe not in others. But for now, we'll go ahead and assume that--

that I know what my current coordinate pair and I know the coordinate x,y of the goal that I'm trying to get to. And in this situation, I'd like an algorithm that

is a little bit more intelligent and somehow knows that I should be making progress towards the goal, and this is probably the way to do that because, in a maze,

moving in the coordinate direction of the goal is usually, though not always, a good thing. And so here we draw a distinction between two different types of search

algorithms-- uninformed search and informed search. Uninformed search algorithms are algorithms like DFS and BFS, the two algorithms that we just looked at,

which are search strategies that don't use any problem specific knowledge to be able to solve the problem. DFS and BFS didn't really care about the structure

of the maze or anything about the way that a maze is in order to solve the problem. They just look at the actions available and choose from those actions,

and it doesn't matter whether if it's a maze or some other problem. The solution, or the way that it tries to solve the problem, is really fundamentally going to be the same.

What we're going to take a look at now is an improvement upon uninformed search. We're going to take a look at informed search.

Informed search are going to be search strategies that use knowledge specific to the problem to be able to better find a solution. And in the case of a maze, this problem specific knowledge

is something like, if I'm going to square that is geographically closer to the goal, that is better than being in a square that is geographically further away.

And this is something we can only know by thinking about this problem and reasoning about what knowledge might be helpful for our AI agent to know a little something about.

There are a number of different types of informed search. Specifically, first, we're going to look at a particular type of search algorithm called greedy best-first search.

Greedy Best-First Search, often abbreviated GBFS, is a search algorithm that, instead of expanding the deepest node, like DFS, or the shallowest node, like BFS,

this algorithm is always going to expand the node that it thinks is closest to the goal. Now, the search algorithm isn't going to know for sure whether it is the closest

thing to the goal, because if we knew what was closest to the goal all the time, then we would already have a solution. Like, the knowledge of what is close to the goal,

we could just follow those steps in order to get from the initial position to the solution. But if we don't know the solution-- meaning we don't know exactly

what's closest to the goal-- instead, we can use an estimate of what's closest to the goal, otherwise known as a heuristic--

just some way of estimating whether or not we're close to the goal. And we'll do so using a heuristic function, conventionally called h(n), that takes a state of input and returns our estimate of how close we

are to the goal. So what might this heuristic function actually look like in the case of a maze-solving algorithm?

Where we're trying to solve a maze, what does a heuristic look like? Well, the heuristic needs to answer a question, like between these two cells, C and D, which one is better?

Which one would I rather be in if I'm trying to find my way to the goal? Well, any human could probably look at this and tell you, you know what? D looks like it's better.

Even if the maze is a convoluted and you haven't thought about all the walls, D is probably better. And why is D better?

Well, because if you ignore the wall-- let's just pretend the walls don't exist for a moment and relax the problem, so to speak-- D, just in terms of coordinate pairs, is closer to this goal.

It's fewer steps that I would need to take to get to the goal, as compared to C, even if you ignore the walls. If you just know the x,y coordinate of C, and the x,y coordinate of the goal,

and likewise, you know the x,y coordinate of D, you can calculate that D, just geographically, ignoring the walls, looks like it's better.

And so this is the heuristic function that we're going to use, and it's something called the Manhattan distance, one specific type of heuristic, where the heuristic is, how many squares vertically

and horizontally and then left to right-- so not allowing myself to go diagonally, just either up or right or left or down. How many steps do I need to take to get from each of these cells to the goal?

Well, as it turns out, D is much closer. There are fewer steps. It only needs to take six steps in order to get to that goal.

Again here ignoring the walls. We've relaxed the problem a little bit. We're just concerned with, if you do the math,

subtract the x values from each other and the y values from each other, what is our estimate of how far we are away? We can estimate that D is closer to the goal than C is.

And so now we have an approach. We have a way of picking which node to remove from the frontier. And at each stage in our algorithm, we're

going to remove a node from the frontier. We're going to explore the node, if it has the smallest value for this heuristic function, if it has the smallest

Manhattan distance to the goal. And so what would this actually look like? Well, let me first label this graph, label this maze,

with a number representing the value of this heuristic function, the value of the Manhattan distance from any of these cells. So from this cell, for example, were one away from the goal.

From this cell, were two away from the goal. Three away, four away. Here we're five away, because we have to go one to the right and then four up.

From somewhere like here, the Manhattan distance is 2. We're only two squares away from the goal, geographically, even though in practices we're

going to have to take a longer path, but we don't know that yet. The heuristic is just some easy way to estimate how far we are away from the goal.

And maybe our heuristic is overly optimistic. It thinks that, yeah, we're only two steps away, when in practice, when you consider the walls, it might be more steps.

So the important thing here is that the heuristic isn't a guarantee of how many steps it's going to take. It is estimating.

It's an attempt at trying to approximate. And it does seem generally the case that the squares that look closer to the goal have smaller values for the heuristic function

than squares that are further away. So now, using greedy best-first search, what might this algorithm actually do? Well, again, for these first five steps, there's not much of a choice.

We started this initial state, A. And we say, all right. We have to explore these five states. But now we have a decision point.

Now we have a choice between going left and going right. And before, when DFS and BFS would just pick arbitrarily because it just depends on the order you throw these two nodes into the frontier--

and we didn't specify what order you put them into the frontier, only the order you take them out. Here we can look at 13 and 11 and say that, all right,

this square is a distance of 11 away from the goal, according to our heuristic, according to our estimate. And this one we estimate to be 13 away from the goal.

So between those two options, between these two choices, I'd rather have the 11. I'd rather be 11 steps away from the goal, so I'll go to the right.

We're able to make an informed decision because we know a little something more about this problem. So then we keep following 10, 9, 8--

between the two sevens. We don't really have much of a way to know between those. So then we do just have to make an arbitrary choice.

And you know what? Maybe we choose wrong. But that's OK because now we can still say, all right, let's try this seven.

We say seven, six. We have to make this choice even though it increases the value of the heuristic function.

But now we have another decision point between six and eight. And between those two-- and really, we're also considering the 13, but that's much higher.

Between six, eight, and 13, well, the six is the smallest value, so we'd rather take the six. We're able to make an informed decision that going this way to the right

is probably better than going that way. So we turn this way. We go to five.

And now we find a decision point where we'll actually make a decision that we might not want to make, but there's unfortunately not too much of a way around this.

We see four and six. Four looks closer to the goal, right? It's going up, and the goal is further up.

So we end up taking that route, which ultimately leads us to a dead end. But that's OK because we can still say, all right, now let's try the six, and now follow this route that will ultimately lead us to the goal.

And so this now is how greedy best-first search might try to approach this problem, by saying whenever we have a decision between multiple nodes that we could explore,

let's explore the node that has the smallest value of h(n), this heuristic function that is estimating how far I have to go. And it just so happens that, in this case,

we end up doing better, in terms of the number of states we needed to explore, than BFS needed to. BFS explored all of this section and all of that section.

But we were able to eliminate that by taking advantage of this heuristic, this knowledge about how close we are to the goal or some estimate of that idea.

So this seems much better. So wouldn't we always prefer an algorithm like this over an algorithm like breadth-first search?

Well, maybe. One thing to take into consideration is that we need to come up with a good heuristic.

How good the heuristic is is going to affect how good this algorithm is. And coming up with a good heuristic can oftentimes be challenging. But the other thing to consider is to ask

the question, just as we did with the prior two algorithms, is this algorithm optimal? Will it always find the shortest path from the initial state to the goal?

And to answer that question, let's take a look at this example for a moment. Take a look at this example. Again, we're trying to get from A to B, and again, I've

labeled each of the cells with their Manhattan distance from the goal, the number of squares up and to the right you would need to travel in order to get from that square to the goal.

And let's think about, would greedy best-first search that always picks the smallest number end up finding the optimal solution? What is the shortest solution, and would this algorithm find it?

And the important thing to realize is that right here is the decision point. We're estimate to be 12 away from the goal. And we have two choices.

We can go to the left, which we estimate to be 13 away from the goal, or we can go up, where we estimate it to be 11 away from the goal. And between those two, greedy best-first search is going to say,

the 11 looks better than the 13. And in doing so, greedy best-first search will end up finding this path to the goal.

But it turns out this path is not optimal. There is a way to get to the goal using fewer steps. And it's actually this way, this way that ultimately involved fewer steps,

even though it meant at this moment choosing the worst option between the two-- or what we estimated to be the worst option, based on the heretics.

And so this is what we mean by this is a greedy algorithm. It's making the best decision, locally. At this decision point, it looks like it's better

to go here than it is to go to the 13. But in the big picture, it's not necessarily optimal, that it might find a solution when in actuality there

was a better solution available. So we would like some way to solve this problem. We like the idea of this heuristic, of being

able to estimate the path, the distance between us and the goal, and that helps us to be able to make better decisions and to eliminate having to search through entire parts of the state

space. But we would like to modify the algorithm so that we can achieve optimality, so that it can be optimal.

And what is the way to do this? What is the intuition here? Well, let's take a look at this problem.

In this initial problem, greedy best-first search found this solution here, this long path. And the reason why it wasn't great is because, yes, the heuristic numbers

went down pretty low, but later on, and they started to build back up. They built back 8, 9, 10, 11-- all the way up to 12, in this case. And so how might we go about trying to improve this algorithm?

Well, one thing that we might realize is that, if we go all the way through this algorithm, through this path, and we end up going to the 12, and we've had to take this many steps-- like,

who knows how many steps that is-- just to get to this 12, we could have also, as an alternative, taken much fewer steps, just six steps, and ended up at this 13 here.

And yes, 13 is more than 12, so it looks like it's not as good, but it required far fewer steps. Right?

It only took six steps to get to this 13 versus many more steps to get to this 12. And while greedy best-first search says, oh, well, 12 is better than 13

so pick the 12, we might more intelligently say, I'd rather be somewhere that heuristically looks like it takes slightly longer if I can get there much more quickly.

And we're going to encode that idea, this general idea, into a more formal algorithm known as A star search. A star search is going to solve this problem by,

instead of just considering the heuristic, also considering how long it took us to get to any particular state. So the distinction is greedy best-first search, if I am in a state

right now, the only thing I care about is what is the estimated distance, the heuristic value, between me and the goal.

Whereas A star search will take into consideration two pieces of information. It'll take into consideration, how far do I estimate I am from the goal,

but also how far did I have to travel in order to get here? Because that is relevant, too. So we'll search algorithms by expanding the node with the lowest

value of g(n) plus h(n). h(n) is that same heuristic that we were talking about a moment ago that's going to vary based on the problem, but g(n) is going to be the cost to reach

the node-- how many steps I had to take, in this case, to get to my current position. So what does that search algorithm look like in practice?

Well, let's take a look. Again, we've got the same maze. And again, I've labeled them with their Manhattan distance.

This value is the h(n) value, the heuristic estimate of how far each of these squares is away from the goal. But now, as we begin to explore states, we

care not just about this heuristic value but also about g(n), the number of steps I had to take in order to get there. And I care about summing those two numbers together.

So what does that look like? On this very first step, I have taken one step. And now I am estimated to be 16 steps away from the goal.

So the total value here is 17. Then I take one more step. I've now taken two steps.

And I estimate myself to be 15 away from the goal-- again, a total value of 17. Now I've taken three steps.

And I'm estimated to be 14 away from the goal, so on and so forth. Four steps, an estimate of 13. Five steps, estimate of 12.