On the Performance of Exhaustive Search with Cooperating agents

Despite the occurrence of elegant algorithms for solving complex problem, exhaustive search has retained its significance since many real-life problems exhibit no regular structure and exhaustive search is the only possible solution. The advent of high-performance computing either via multicore processors or distributed processors emphasizes the possibility for exhaustive search by multiple search agents. Here we analyse the performance of exhaustive search when it is conducted by multiple search agents. Several strategies for cooperation between the search agents are evaluated. We discover that the performance of the search improves with the increase in the level of cooperation. Same search performance can be achieved with homogeneous and heterogeneous search agents provided that the length of subregions allocated to individual search regions follow the differences in the speeds of heterogeneous search agents.