I was reading about the variants of the A* search algorithm and I came across dynamic weighting. As I understand it, a weight is applied to the search equation, which decreases as the search gets closer to the goal node. I was specifically looking at this article : http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/Variations.html
Can anyone tell me what the advantages of this would be? Why would you not care what nodes you expand at the start? Is it to help searches that don't necessarily have a good heuristic?
Thanks