A Topological Approach to Meta-heuristics: Analytical Results on the BFS vs. DFS Algorithm Selection Problem

Search is a central problem in artificial intelligence, and BFS and DFS the two most fundamental ways to search. In this report we derive results for average BFS and DFS runtime: For tree search, we employ a probabilistic model of goal distribution; for graph search, the analysis depends on an additional statistic of path redundancy and average branching factor. As an application, we use the results on two concrete grammar problems. The runtime estimates can be used to select the faster out of BFS and DFS for a given problem, and may form the basis for further analysis of more advanced search methods. Finally, we verify our results experimentally; the analytical approximations come surprisingly close to empirical reality.