Beam search

In computer science, beam search is a heuristic search algorithm that explores a graph by expanding the most promising node in a limited set. Beam search is an optimization of best-first search that reduces its memory requirements. Best-first search is a graph search which orders all partial solutions (states) according to some heuristic which attempts to predict how close a partial solution is to a complete solution (goal state). But in beam search, only a predetermined number of best partial solutions are kept as candidates.