Dynamic Backtracking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel backtracking method that moves backtrack points deeper in the search space, improving efficiency while maintaining polynomial space complexity and completeness guarantees.

Contribution

It presents a dependency-directed backtracking variant that enhances search efficiency by relocating backtrack points deeper, using only polynomial space.

Findings

Improved search efficiency by relocating backtrack points

Maintains polynomial space complexity

Retains completeness guarantees

Abstract

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.