1Search-Space Characterization for Real-time Heuristic Search

Abstract—Recent real-time heuristic search algorithms have demonstrated outstanding performance in video-game pathfind-ing. However, their applications have been thus far limited to that domain. We proceed with the aim of facilitating wider applica-tions of real-time search by fostering a greater understanding of the performance of recent algorithms. We first introduce eight algorithm-independent complexity measures for search spaces and correlate their values with algorithm performance. The complexity measures are statistically shown to be significant predictors of algorithm performance across a set of commercial video-game maps. We then extend this analysis to a wider variety of search spaces in the first application of database-driven real-time search to domains outside of video-game pathfinding. In doing so, we gain insight into algorithm performance and possible enhancement as well as into search space complexity. Index Terms—real-time heuristic search, search-space com-plexity, video-game pathfinding I