What are practical applications of the AO* algorithm?

Question

Those who have worked or working in artificial intelligence(or equivalent) area should be knowing the AO* algorithm very well.

Its pretty clear that it is a generalized algorithm.

Do anybody of you have come across any practical application of the AO* algorithm?Some of you might already have worked on it.

So it would be great if you can share your thoughts or experience on AO* algorithm, how it can actually be used practically. what is the power of it?

Those who don't know the AO* algorithm, can refer following pdf (size -291 KB)

Generalized AO* algorithm

Solution

AO* has rarely been used in practical applications, to my knowledge. It is useful for searching game trees, problem solving etc. but in most cases more domain specific search algorithms (e.g. alpha-beta pruning for game trees, general or domain specific planning algorithms) are used instead.

In particular, AI uses knowledge-intensive approaches and in practical applications heavy use is made of domain specific knowledge or problem conditions to produce better (faster or more optimal solutions).

Game search is an example where full-breadth search is standard, but this may because of the small (relative to other domains) size of the search space. Even in game tree search, extensive use is made of problem specific features, i.e. often search is terminated only in quiescent states (i.e. not during a forced exchange or when there is a check).

In planning, often knowledge is used to guide a search of a generated solution space rather than doing a state space search. This gives non-optimal solutions but for many domains it yields reasonable solutions at much less cost.