How MEA Works
The MEA technique is a strategy to control search in problem-solving. Given a current state and a goal state, an action is chosen which will reduce the difference between the two. The action is performed on the current state to produce a new state, and the process is recursively applied to this new state and the goal state.
Note that, in order for MEA to be effective, the goal-seeking system must have a means of associating to any kind of detectable difference those actions that are relevant to reducing that difference. It must also have means for detecting the progress it is making (the changes in the differences between the actual and the desired state), as some attempted sequences of actions may fail and, hence, some alternate sequences may be tried.
When knowledge is available concerning the importance of differences, the most important difference is selected first to further improve the average performance of MEA over other brute-force search strategies. However, even without the ordering of differences according to importance, MEA improves over other search heuristics (again in the average case) by focusing the problem solving on the actual differences between the current state and that of the goal.
Read more about this topic: Means-ends Analysis
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