Studies of active information in search.

Abstract

A search process is an attempt to locate a solution to a problem, such as an optimization problem, where the space is usually too large to exhaustively sample. In order to investigate this idea this work looks a three examples of searches as cases studies. The examples considered are the location of a hidden string using a hamming distance, the encoding of a binary string using a perceptron, and developing programs using nand gates. In all of these cases, it is shown that the search processes work by making use of problem specific information. In addition, the algorithms used to demonstrate these search processes are often relatively inefficient at extracting the information from the available knowledge sources.