I'm taking an introductory course in AI and we've been given the assignment to solve a puzzle using different search algorithms on a state space (BFS, DFS etc). I understand the theory and everything, but I'm not sure what information I should store in the nodes of the tree.
Assume that I have a matrix to represent the game board. Should each node in the tree contain the entire board? For example, in the case of 19x19 Go, would each node consist a matrix of size 19x19 (the problem I'm trying to solve is a 1 player game, and not Go or chess or anything like that, however)? If this is the case, even with pruning, it sounds to me like this would take up an insane amount of space. For example, at depth 1, a state space of the game of Go would have 19*19 nodes each containing a 19*19 matrix (correct me if I'm wrong here). At the same time, I can't find a better option.
What is the general approach to storing these kinds of states?
Any help is greatly appreciated. Please let me know if the question is in any way unclear.