## Experiments in the Automatic Selection of Problem-solving Strategies

• We present an approach to automating the selection of search-guiding heuris-tics that control the search conducted by a problem solver. The approach centerson representing problems with feature vectors that are vectors of numerical val-ues. Thus, similarity between problems can be determined by using a distancemeasure on feature vectors. Given a database of problems, each problem beingassociated with the heuristic that was used to solve it, heuristics to be employedto solve a novel problem are suggested in correspondence with the similaritybetween the novel problem and problems of the database.Our approach is strongly connected with instance-based learning and nearest-neighbor classification and therefore possesses incremental learning capabilities.In experimental studies it has proven to be a viable tool for achieving the finaland crucial missing piece of automation of problem solving - namely selecting anappropriate search-guiding heuristic - in a flexible way.This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

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