What is heuristic search?

Searching and organizing data is an important topic within Artificial Intelligence. There are many problems that require searching for an answer within the solution domain. There are many possible solutions to a given problem and we do not know which ones are correct. By efficiently organizing the data, we can search for solutions quickly and effectively.

More often, there are so many possible options to solve a given problem that no algorithm can be developed to find a right solution. Also, going through every single solution is not possible because it is prohibitively expensive. In such cases, we rely on a rule of thumb that helps us narrow down the search by eliminating the options that are obviously wrong. This rule of thumb is called a heuristic. The method of using heuristics to guide our search is called heuristic search.

Heuristic techniques are very handy because they help us speed up the process. Even if the heuristic is not able to completely eliminate...