Coalition structure generation with the graphics processing unit

Coalition Structure Generation—the problem of finding the optimal division of agents into coalitions—has received considerable attention in recent AI literature. The fastest exact algorithm to solve this problem is IDP-IP [17], which is a hybrid of two previous algorithms, namely IDP and IP. Given this, it is desirable to speed up IDP as this will, in turn, improve upon the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we present IDP—the first coalition structure generation algorithm based on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This follows a promising, new algorithm design paradigm that can provide significant speedups. We show that IDP is faster than IDP by two orders of magnitude.