Title: Cultural Interest W02
Course: CS171: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

- A* Search in Interplanetary Trajectory Design, courtesy of Eric Trumbauer, former CS-271 student and Aero/Astro PhD student.
Dr. Trumbauer comments, “One thing to possibly discuss with the last slide is that the itinerary it settles on does stay at a higher energy for a little bit until it passes closest to Europa, maximizing the velocity before the insertion sequence to the lower energy. This is indeed optimal behavior, as opposed to immediately reducing its energy as a Greedy Best First algorithm using this heuristic would want to do.”
- A* Search in Protein Structure Prediction, Lathrop and Smith, J. Mol. Biol (JMB cover article) (read full paper).
Prof. Lathrop comments, “The A* algorithm found and proved many global optimum solutions for the difficult and important real-world problem of protein structure prediction from sequence within two hours in search spaces sizes as large as 10^20 to 10^30, which are search space sizes totally and completely inaccessible to blind search methods.”