New Developments in the Theoretical Structure of Search Algorithms.

While most of my talks have a decent experimental section, this talk will be entirely theoretical, yet exciting. The known A* search algorithm has classic theoretical understandings and guarantees that date back to 1985. But, how are these attributes applied to new algorithms and new settings? In this talk I will first cover the basic structure and the classic theory behind A* focusing on what part of the search space must be searched. I will then show how my colleagues and I have generalized this classic knowledge over the years to new search algorithms (e.g., OGA, 2013) and to new settings such as bidirectional search (FMM, 2017) and recently to multi-objective search (MOS-A 2026). I will conclude with some open challenges. No prior knowledge is required as I will cover all the basics