Resolution in FOL

Perfect information Chess, Checkers, go, Othello Backgammon, monopoly

Forward Chaining and backward chaining
Backward Chaining vs Forward Chaining Imperfect information Battleships, blind, tic-tac-toe Bridge, poker, scrabble, nuclear
Reasoning in AI war
Inductive vs. Deductive reasoning

Perfect information: A game with the perfect information is that in which agents can look into the
complete board. Agents have all the information about the game, and they can see each other
moves also. Examples are Chess, Checkers, Go, etc.

Imperfect information: If in a game agents do not have all information about the game and not
aware with what's going on, such type of games are called the game with imperfect information,
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such as tic-tac-toe, Battleship, blind, Bridge, etc.

Adversarial Search Deterministic games: Deterministic games are those games which follow a strict pattern and set of
rules for the games, and there is no randomness associated with them. Examples are chess,
Adversarial search is a search, where we examine the problem which arises when we try to plan
Checkers, Go, tic-tac-toe, etc.
ahead of the world and other agents are planning against us.
Non-deterministic games: Non-deterministic are those games which have various unpredictable
In previous topics, we have studied the search strategies which are only associated with a single events and has a factor of chance or luck. This factor of chance or luck is introduced by either dice or
agent that aims to find the solution which often expressed in the form of a sequence of actions. cards. These are random, and each action response is not fixed. Such games are also called as
stochastic games.
But, there might be some situations where more than one agent is searching for the solution in the
Example: Backgammon, Monopoly, Poker, etc.
same search space, and this situation usually occurs in game playing.

The environment with more than one agent is termed as multi-agent environment, in which each
agent is an opponent of other agent and playing against each other. Each agent needs to consider Note: In this topic, we will discuss deterministic games, fully observable environment, zero-sum,
the action of other agent and effect of that action on their performance. and where each agent acts alternatively.

So, Searches in which two or more players with conflicting goals are trying to explore the
same search space for the solution, are called adversarial searches, often known as Games.

Games are modeled as a Search problem and heuristic evaluation function, and these are the two
main factors which help to model and solve games in AI.

Types of Games in AI:

Zero-Sum Game

Zero-sum games are adversarial search which involves pure competition.

In Zero-sum game each agent's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of
utility of another agent.

One player of the game try to maximize one single value, while other player tries to minimize it.
Deterministic Chance Moves
 Each move by one player in the game is called as ply. MIN minimizes the result.

Chess and tic-tac-toe are examples of a Zero-sum game.

Zero-sum game: Embedded thinking

The Zero-sum game involved embedded thinking in which one agent or player is trying to figure out:

What to do.

How to decide the move

Needs to think about his opponent as well

The opponent also thinks what to do

Each of the players is trying to find out the response of his opponent to their actions. This requires
embedded thinking or backward reasoning to solve the game problems in AI.

Formalization of the problem:

A game can be defined as a type of search in AI which can be formalized of the following elements:

Initial state: It specifies how the game is set up at the start.

Example Explanation:
Player(s): It specifies which player has moved in the state space.
From the initial state, MAX has 9 possible moves as he starts first. MAX place x and MIN place o, and
Action(s): It returns the set of legal moves in state space. both player plays alternatively until we reach a leaf node where one player has three in a row or all
squares are filled.
Result(s, a): It is the transition model, which specifies the result of moves in the state space.
Both players will compute each node, minimax, the minimax value which is the best achievable utility
Terminal-Test(s): Terminal test is true if the game is over, else it is false at any case. The state where
against an optimal adversary.
the game ends is called terminal states.
Suppose both the players are well aware of the tic-tac-toe and playing the best play. Each player is
Utility(s, p): A utility function gives the final numeric value for a game that ends in terminal states s
doing his best to prevent another one from winning. MIN is acting against Max in the game.
for player p. It is also called payoff function. For Chess, the outcomes are a win, loss, or draw and its
payoff values are +1, 0, ½. And for tic-tac-toe, utility values are +1, -1, and 0. So in the game tree, we have a layer of Max, a layer of MIN, and each layer is called as Ply. Max
place x, then MIN puts o to prevent Max from winning, and this game continues until the terminal
Game tree: node.

A game tree is a tree where nodes of the tree are the game states and Edges of the tree are the moves by In this either MIN wins, MAX wins, or it's a draw. This game-tree is the whole search space of
players. Game tree involves initial state, actions function, and result Function. possibilities that MIN and MAX are playing tic-tac-toe and taking turns alternately.

Example: Tic-Tac-Toe game tree: Hence adversarial Search for the minimax procedure works as follows:

The following figure is showing part of the game-tree for tic-tac-toe game. Following are some key points
It aims to find the optimal strategy for MAX to win the game.
of the game:
It follows the approach of Depth-first search.
There are two players MAX and MIN.
In the game tree, optimal leaf node could appear at any depth of the tree.
Players have an alternate turn and start with MAX.
Propagate the minimax values up to the tree until the terminal node discovered.
MAX maximizes the result of the game tree
 In a given game tree, the optimal strategy can be determined from the minimax value of each node,
which can be written as MINIMAX(n). MAX prefer to move to a state of maximum value and MIN prefer to
move to a state of minimum value then:

Important Features of Adversarial Search

An important field in artificial intelligence is adversarial search. This deals with decision-making when
faced with hostile situations. Here are some key aspects of adversarial search:

Perfect or Imperfect Information

In games, there are two main types of information players have access to - perfect and imperfect. In
games with perfect information, all players fully know the current state of the game. However, in
games with imperfect information, some details are kept hidden from the players.

Adversarial Search Algorithms

In competitive games such as chess, a contender might use a method referred to as the minimax
strategy or the alpha-beta pruning to determine the best move. Such algorithms estimate feasible
results of each move and give hints that indicate the correct platform for the player.

Thumb Rule
The tree can be quite large and in some cases, this may mean that the full search of the tree may not
be achievable. In these cases, the algorithm utilizes heuristics, i.e., shortcuts that allow it to proceed
faster through the game tree, avoiding the need to evaluate every possible move. These short rules
provide an estimate of the best move, possible without actually exploring the complete game tree.

Next Topic Mini-Max Algorithm

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