Self-organizing search lists using probabilistic back-pointers

A class of algorithms is given for maintaining self-organizing sequential search lists, where the only permutation applied is to move the accessed record of each search some distance towards the front of the list. During searches, these algorithms retain a back-pointer to a previously probed record in order to determine the destination of the accessed record's eventual move. The back-pointer does not traverse the list, but rather it is advanced occationally to point to the record just probed by the search algorithm. This avoids the cost of a second traversal through a significant portion of the list, which may be a significant savings when each record access may require a new page to be brought into primary memory. Probabilistic functions for deciding when to advance the pointer are presented and analyzed. These functions demonstrate average case complexities of measures such as asymptotic cost and convergence similar to some of the more common list update algorithms in the literature. In cases where the accessed record is moved forward a distance proportional to the distance to the front of the list, the use of these functions may save up to 50% of the time required for permuting the list

Best-first heuristic search for multicore machines

To harness modern multicore processors, it is imperative to develop parallel versions of fundamental algorithms. In this paper, we compare different approaches to parallel best-first search in a shared-memory setting. We present a new method, PBNF, that uses abstraction to partition the state space and to detect duplicate states without requiring frequent locking. PBNF allows speculative expansions when necessary to keep threads busy. We identify and fix potential livelock conditions in our approach, proving its correctness using temporal logic. Our approach is general, allowing it to extend easily to suboptimal and anytime heuristic search. In an empirical comparison on STRIPS planning, grid pathfinding, and sliding tile puzzle problems using 8-core machines, we show that A*, weighted A* and Anytime weighted A* implemented using PBNF yield faster search than improved versions of previous parallel search proposals

Online Computation with Untrusted Advice

The advice model of online computation captures a setting in which the algorithm is given some partial information concerning the request sequence. This paradigm allows to establish tradeoffs between the amount of this additional information and the performance of the online algorithm. However, if the advice is corrupt or, worse, if it comes from a malicious source, the algorithm may perform poorly. In this work, we study online computation in a setting in which the advice is provided by an untrusted source. Our objective is to quantify the impact of untrusted advice so as to design and analyze online algorithms that are robust and perform well even when the advice is generated in a malicious, adversarial manner. To this end, we focus on well-studied online problems such as ski rental, online bidding, bin packing, and list update. For ski-rental and online bidding, we show how to obtain algorithms that are Pareto-optimal with respect to the competitive ratios achieved; this improves upon the framework of Purohit et al. [NeurIPS 2018] in which Pareto-optimality is not necessarily guaranteed. For bin packing and list update, we give online algorithms with worst-case tradeoffs in their competitiveness, depending on whether the advice is trusted or not; this is motivated by work of Lykouris and Vassilvitskii [ICML 2018] on the paging problem, but in which the competitiveness depends on the reliability of the advice. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to prove lower bounds, within this model, on the tradeoff between the number of advice bits and the competitiveness of any online algorithm. Last, we study the effect of randomization: here we show that for ski-rental there is a randomized algorithm that Pareto-dominates any deterministic algorithm with advice of any size. We also show that a single random bit is not always inferior to a single advice bit, as it happens in the standard model

New Bounds for Randomized List Update in the Paid Exchange Model

We study the fundamental list update problem in the paid exchange model P^d. This cost model was introduced by Manasse, McGeoch and Sleator [M.S. Manasse et al., 1988] and Reingold, Westbrook and Sleator [N. Reingold et al., 1994]. Here the given list of items may only be rearranged using paid exchanges; each swap of two adjacent items in the list incurs a cost of d. Free exchanges of items are not allowed. The model is motivated by the fact that, when executing search operations on a data structure, key comparisons are less expensive than item swaps. We develop a new randomized online algorithm that achieves an improved competitive ratio against oblivious adversaries. For large d, the competitiveness tends to 2.2442. Technically, the analysis of the algorithm relies on a new approach of partitioning request sequences and charging expected cost. Furthermore, we devise lower bounds on the competitiveness of randomized algorithms against oblivious adversaries. No such lower bounds were known before. Specifically, we prove that no randomized online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio smaller than 2 in the partial cost model, where an access to the i-th item in the current list incurs a cost of i-1 rather than i. All algorithms proposed in the literature attain their competitiveness in the partial cost model. Furthermore, we show that no randomized online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio smaller than 1.8654 in the standard full cost model. Again the lower bounds hold for large d

Action planning for graph transition systems

Graphs are suitable modeling formalisms for software and hardware systems involving aspects such as communication, object orientation, concurrency, mobility and distribution. State spaces of such systems can be represented by graph transition systems, which are basically transition systems whose states and transitions represent graphs and graph morphisms. In this paper, we propose the modeling of graph transition systems in PDDL and the application of heuristic search planning for their analysis. We consider different heuristics and present experimental results