3 States and Searching
Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.
- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The previous chapter discussed how an agent perceives and acts, but not how its goals affect its actions. An agent could be programmed to act in the world to achieve a fixed set of goals, but then it may not adapt to changing goals and so would not be intelligent. Alternatively, an agent could reason about its abilities and its goals to determine what to do. This chapter shows how the problem of an agent deciding what to do can be cast as the problem of searching to find a path in a graph, and it presents a number of ways that such problems can be solved on a computer. As Mencken suggests in the quote above, the mind uses search to solve problems, although not always successfully.
