Abstract
How efficiently can we search an unknown environment for a goal in unknown position? How much would it help if the environment were known? We answer these questions for simple polygons and for general graphs, by providing online search strategies that are as good as the best offline search algorithms, up to a constant factor. For other settings we prove that no such online algorithms exist.
The work described in this paper was partially supported by a grant from the Germany/Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme sponsored by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong and the German Academic Exchange Service (Project No. G-HK024/02).
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Fleischer, R., Kamphans, T., Klein, R., Langetepe, E., Trippen, G. (2004). Competitive Online Approximation of the Optimal Search Ratio. In: Albers, S., Radzik, T. (eds) Algorithms – ESA 2004. ESA 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3221. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30140-0_31
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30140-0_31
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