Intuitively, I feel like the final board might also be able to be tackled in browser, if you use WASM and speed up the solver.
I wonder: maybe the state is overly compressed? Could it speed things up to store (boxes, [every position the keeper can reach without pushing]) rather than (boxes, representative keeper position), so we can reduce recomputation of the keeper walking around?
I wonder: maybe A* is counterproductive, as obvious heuristics have traps? Maybe BFS is better?
I wonder: the search doesn't actually "skip over" walking states, it just hides them in the processing of each element in the queue, so adding them to the queue might actually be faster?
I wonder: are there any other simple pruning techniques that you could incorporate? Any learnings from state-of-the-art Sokoban solvers, like this one? -- https://ieee-cog.org/2020/papers/paper_44.pdf
Many interesting questions... sadly, the webpage is written by AI, so there's zero discussion of these tradeoffs, future avenues, or rejected ideas, in favor of meaningless self-congratulatory copy about the "provable optimum" and silly claims like a bucket queue being allocation-free.
Hmm, I would say even older than that (which, of course, is in no way intended to be a value statement of any kind, I like the website and the project, cool idea! :D).
If you squint a little, the linked project is basically a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm with optimized implementation, heuristics and so on. I also think that A* was associated with AI due to its use in path finding in early robotics - But I am not sure!
While impressive that the optimal can be proven, I feel like the example puzzles here aren't ones that are particularly hard to find solutions for (when move count doesnt matter). I'd be interested to see at least one example that has a lot of tricky dead states that would act as traps.
Imagine providing AI with ability to poke around a large bank of gridbased game problem instances. Ask it to solve them and learn from them and then generate new problem instances.
I wonder: maybe the state is overly compressed? Could it speed things up to store (boxes, [every position the keeper can reach without pushing]) rather than (boxes, representative keeper position), so we can reduce recomputation of the keeper walking around?
I wonder: maybe A* is counterproductive, as obvious heuristics have traps? Maybe BFS is better?
I wonder: the search doesn't actually "skip over" walking states, it just hides them in the processing of each element in the queue, so adding them to the queue might actually be faster?
I wonder: are there any other simple pruning techniques that you could incorporate? Any learnings from state-of-the-art Sokoban solvers, like this one? -- https://ieee-cog.org/2020/papers/paper_44.pdf
Many interesting questions... sadly, the webpage is written by AI, so there's zero discussion of these tradeoffs, future avenues, or rejected ideas, in favor of meaningless self-congratulatory copy about the "provable optimum" and silly claims like a bucket queue being allocation-free.
Seems to be AI in the older sense from 10 years ago?
In 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo came around and latest from there on, AI was associated heavily with NNs, deep learning and so on (but not with the transformer architecture which became popular later, the foundational paper itself was published in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need).
If you squint a little, the linked project is basically a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm with optimized implementation, heuristics and so on. I also think that A* was associated with AI due to its use in path finding in early robotics - But I am not sure!