When Heuristics Go Silent: How Random Walks Outsmart Breadth-First Search
A planner stalls. Not because the goal vanished. Not because the system lacks compute. Not even because the heuristic is completely wrong. It stalls because the heuristic has temporarily stopped saying anything useful. Every nearby state looks equally unpromising, or worse, misleadingly unpromising. The algorithm is still running, naturally. It is very busy being lost. ...