5 min readSearch and Games
The Fix That Changed the Success Rate Far More Than the Cost
Allowing sideways moves takes hill climbing on 8 queens from 14.75% of runs solved to 94.55%, which reads like a six-fold improvement and is not one: with random restarts the expected cost of a solution goes from 21.9 steps to 23.1, and counted in moves evaluated it falls by 16%, from 1,547 to 1,298. Simulated annealing solves 98.8% and costs 1,622 evaluations. What changed was mostly the statistic, not the work.
Artificial Intelligence