Wow I got thrashed by chatgpt. Strictly speaking that is correct, it is more akin to Tree Search. But even then not strictly because in tree search you are searching through a list of objects that is known, you build a tree out of it and based on some conditions eliminate half of the remaining tree each time. Here I have some state space (as chatgpt claims!) and again based on applying certain conditions, I eliminate some portion of the search space successively (so I dont have to evaluate that part of the tree anymore). To me both are very similar in spirit as both methods avoid evaluating some function on all the possible inputs and successively chops off a fraction of the search space. To be more correct I will atleast replace it with tree search though, thanks. And thanks for taking a close look at my solution and improving it.