[amyfp214]

>So the wider the beam, the better the outcome?

I looked into it, this "beam search" is nothing but a bit of puffed up nomenclature, not unlike the shock and awe of understanding a language such as Java that introduces synonyms for common terms for no apparent reason, not unlike the intimidating name of "bonferroni multiple test correction" which is just a (1/n) divison operation.

"Beam search" is breadth-first search. Instead of taking all the child nodes at a layer, it takes the top <n> according to some heuristic. But "top n" wasn't enough for whoever cooked up that trivial algorithm, so instead it's "beam width". It probably has more complexities in AI where that particular heuristic becomes more mathematical and complex, as heuristics tend to do.