Because of their occasional need to return to shallow points in a search
tree, existing backtracking methods can sometimes erase meaningful progress
toward solving a search problem. In this paper, we present a method by which
backtrack points can be moved deeper in the search space, thereby avoiding this
difficulty. The technique developed is a variant of dependency-directed
backtracking that uses only polynomial space while still providing useful
control information and retaining the completeness guarantees provided by
earlier approaches.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for an online appendix and other files
accompanying this articl