Evaluating Standard Search Enhancements Performance in Zen Puzzle Garden

• Published in: IEEE CHILEAN Conference on Electrical, Electronics Engineering, Information and Communication Technologies. (Online) pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: Schaa, Hans, del Solar-Zavala, Jose A., Barriga, Nicolas A.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 05.12.2023
• Subjects: Games; Heuristic Search; Information and communication technology; Iterative algorithms; Pathfinding; Planning; Puzzle Games; Sokoban-type Puzzles; System recovery; Testing
• ISSN: 2832-1537
• DOI: 10.1109/CHILECON60335.2023.10418770

Sokoban-type puzzles and their variants involve complex planning and decision-making challenges in wide and deep search spaces. Such scenarios are interesting for testing path-planning algorithms. This document uses A * and IDA * (Iterative Deepening A *) algorithms to solve Zen Puzzle Garden game boards; a Sokoban-type puzzle where you need rake the sandy area completely. The algorithms are evaluated in terms of speed and node expansion in moderately complex boards. Additionally, we implement three improvements: transposition tables, move ordering, and deadlock tables. The results show that IDA * with the three proposed improvements is on average faster than A *. Although its strength is its low memory usage, it can be seen that it is very competitive versus A * in terms of time usage. Transposition tables and deadlocks tables reduce by 500 times the number of nodes expanded by the IDA * without improvements. On the other hand, the ordering of nodes is not very effective for some boards, which causes a worse performance of the IDA * algorithm, giving rise to greater exploration in boards that do not lead to the solution. Studying these algorithms can be beneficial in the field of path-finding for Sokoban-type game domains or solver-based procedural content generators.