In this paper we formally define the structural description of an object and the concepts of exact and inexact matching of
two structural descriptions.
We discuss the problems associated
with a brute-force backtracking tree search for inexact matching and develop several different algorithms to make the tree search
more efficient.
We develop the formula for the expected number
of nodes in the tree for backtracking alone and vith a forward
checking algorithm.
Finally we present experimental results
verifying the theory and showing that forward checking is the most efficient of the algorithms tested
