"Given the role symbols play in representing concepts in the wider world, a fundamental question for AI is straightforward. How do we manipulate symbols in meaningful ways? This naturally brings us to one of the six ideas central to AI today. It's an idea for manipulating symbols, and it is ridiculously simple: You can reduce many problems to searching for an answer."
"This sounds not just simple but self-­evident, so let me make it a little more complex. You can reduce many problems in AI to the computer searching its internal representation of the world from the symbol representing the starting state to the symbol representing the goal state. This is not a new idea. It's called navigation. You search a map for the route from your starting position to your desired end position. We do this all the time."
"A* search was invented in 1968 to navigate a robot called Shakey. Shakey was, as the name suggests, a rather shaky robot built at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. It was the first attempt to build a fully fledged robot like you see in the movies - a robot with a camera to see the world, a microphone to hear commands, wheels and motors to move about, and an onboard computer to make"
Symbols serve to represent real-world concepts, and meaningful AI requires manipulating those symbols. Many AI tasks can be framed as searching an internal symbolic representation from a start symbol to a goal symbol. This framing parallels navigation: finding a route on a map from one location to another. Humans perform such navigation routinely, for example planning London Underground transfers from Bond St. to Kings Cross. Computers can replicate this process using specialized search algorithms. A* search prioritizes moves that seem to bring the search closer to the goal and was created in 1968 to guide the Shakey robot.
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