ABSTRACT
At one time AI researchers believed that the problem of search was the central problem of AI. A parser would search through the possible syntactic structures of a sentence; a game player would search through the possible legal moves in a game, etc. (c.f., Nilsson [79]). People now tend to emphasize the fact that programs with sufficient knowledge of their domains can avoid searching large spaces, but it is recognized that in some cases one must still resort to search.
