Is heuristic search artificial intelligence?
In Chapter 2, Fundamental Use Cases for Artificial Intelligence, we learned about the five tribes as defined by Pedro Domingos. One of the most "ancient" tribes is the symbolist tribe. At least to me, this fact is not surprising. As humans, we try to find rules and patterns in everything. Unfortunately, the world is sometimes messy and not everything follows simple rules.
This is the reason why other tribes emerged to help us when we don't have an orderly world. However, when our search spaces are small and the domain is limited, using heuristics, constraint satisfaction, and other techniques laid out in this chapter, is useful for this set of problems. These techniques are useful when the number of combinations is relatively small and combinatorial explosion is limited. For example, solving the traveling salesman problem is simple with these techniques when the number of cities is around 20. If we try to solve the...