Autonomous search is a particular case of adaptive systems that aims at improving its solving performance by adapting itself to the problem at hand. We propose a general definition and a taxonomy of search processes w.r.t. their computation characteristics. This formalism is expressed by some computation rules between computation states. The sequence of application of these rules (i.e., the strategy) then characterizes the search process itself. Using these rules we then classify some well known solvers and try to answer the question that was raised during the first workshop on Autonomous Search: "What is Autonomous search?"

PostScript file

Details