Robert C. Holte

Holte's History of A*

Abstract:

In this talk I give a personal perspective on the history of A* up to 1983, centering the talk on statements made by influential researchers such as Nils Nilsson, Ira Pohl, Edward Feigenbaum, and Judea Pearl. I primarily focus on A* itself, as opposed to its derivatives such as weighted A*.

Bio:

Professor Emeritus Robert Holte of the Computing Science Department at the University of Alberta is a former editor-in-chief of the journal "Machine Learning" and co-founder and former director of the Alberta Innovates Center for Machine Learning (AICML, now known as Amii). His current research is on single-agent heuristic search, with seminal contributions on bidirectional search, methods for predicting the run-time of IDA*, and the use of machine learning to create heuristics. Professor Holte was elected a Fellow of the AAAI in 2011.

Richard E. Korf

A* from 1983 to the Present

Abstract:

Whereas Rob Holte will cover the history of A* up to 1983, I'll pick up the story from there, and describe the genesis of other related algorithms, such as Iterative-Deepening-A* (IDA*), Real-Time-A* (RTA*) and Learning Real-Time-A* (LRTA*), Weighted Iterative-Deepening-A* (WIDA*), Recursive Best-First Search (RBFS), and external memory search algorithms. Most researchers have a story about how one piece of research led to the next, but that story is not usually recorded in the papers describing the individual works. I'll try to relate that story as best I can.

Bio:

Richard Korf is a Professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.S. from M.I.T. in 1977, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980 and 1983, respectively, all in computer science. From 1983 to 1985, he served as Herbert M. Singer Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. His research is in the areas of problem solving, planning, and heuristic search in artificial intelligence. He is the author of "Learning to Solve Problems by Searching for Macro-Operators" (Pitman, 1985). Dr. Korf is the recipient of a 1985 IBM Faculty Development Award, a 1986 NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the first UCLA Computer Science Department Distinguished Teaching Award in 1989, the UCLA Engineering School First Annual Student's Choice Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1996, the Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award in 2005, and the Artificial Intelligence Classic Paper Award in 2016. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1994.