In this lab exercise, you will use a tool in the "CISpace"
Computational Intelligence Lab at UBC in Vancouver
to explore different search algorithms.
You need to go to the CI Space Web site
at
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/lci/CIspace
and invoke the "Search" applet.
Alternatively, you can also download the code,
and run it locally on your machine as Java application.
The task is to experiment with the different search methods,
and examine the way they work by looking at a number of
examples.
Examine the sample graph
specified in the file CI-Search-CA.txt
(http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~fkurfess/Courses/CSC-480/F03/Assignments/CI-Search-CA.txt).
This graph represents some distances between cities
in California, and the goal is to explore paths between
Bishop and San Luis Obispo. You can either copy and paste
the contents of the file into the editing view of the Search applet,
or download the code, run it as a Java application,
and load the example file from there.
For these two tasks, it is advisable to experiment
with different parameter settings (see "Search Options"
and "Pruning" menus) to eliminate loops and other
efficiency obstacles.