Perhaps, but IMHO the obsession with "provably optimal" is bad and will never lead to anything useful. The real world is messy and complicated. Search spaces ar

Perhaps, but IMHO the obsession with "provably optimal" is bad and will never lead to anything useful. The real world is messy and complicated. Search spaces are far too large to ever completely explore. We need heuristics to do things in a reasonable amount of time. Heuristics that exploit the structure of the problem we are trying to solve. And those are going to be difficult if not impossible to formally verify.