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Unit 2 - Adversarial Searching

The document discusses adversarial search in game playing, focusing on optimal decision-making and techniques like minimax and alpha-beta pruning. It highlights the challenges of game trees, particularly in complex games like chess, and the necessity of heuristic search procedures to improve decision-making efficiency. The properties and effectiveness of the minimax algorithm and alpha-beta pruning are also detailed, emphasizing their role in optimizing game strategy.

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Pratik Nirgun
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6 views

Unit 2 - Adversarial Searching

The document discusses adversarial search in game playing, focusing on optimal decision-making and techniques like minimax and alpha-beta pruning. It highlights the challenges of game trees, particularly in complex games like chess, and the necessity of heuristic search procedures to improve decision-making efficiency. The properties and effectiveness of the minimax algorithm and alpha-beta pruning are also detailed, emphasizing their role in optimizing game strategy.

Uploaded by

Pratik Nirgun
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Adversarial (do with conflict)

Search
Unit- 2
Game Playing
Outline
• Game domain
• Optimal decisions
• α-β pruning
Game domain
• Game playing can be achieve by machine
intelligence
• They provide structured task – easy to
measure success or failure
• They do not require large amount of
knowledge
• Can solvable by straightforward search to
solve from starting state to winning state
• Not true for all the games.
Contd…
• In the chess machine
• Average branching factor is 35
• In an average game each player might
make 50 moves
• In order to examine the complete game
tree, we would have to examine 35100
positions
• Therefore it is highly impossible to select a
move during the lifetime of the opponent
Solution
• Some kind of heuristic search procedure is
necessary
• Improve the generate procedure so that
only good moves (or paths) are generated
• Improve the test procedure so that the
best moves (or paths) will be recognized
and explored
• Minmax search procedure
• It is depth-first, depth-limited search
procedure.
Games vs. search problems
• "Unpredictable" opponent → specifying a
move for every possible opponent reply
• Time limits → unlikely to find goal, must
approximate
Optimal Decision in Games
• Initial state : which represented board
position and identifies the player to move
• Successor function : which returns a list of
(move , state) pairs. Legal move and
resulting state.
• Terminal state : which determine where
the game is over
• utility function : which gives numeric value
for the terminal states. (ex : +1,0,-1)
Game tree (2-player,
deterministic, turns)
Minimax
• Perfect play for deterministic games
• Idea: choose move to position with highest minimax
value
= best achievable payoff against best play
• E.g., 2-ply game:
Minimax algorithm
Properties of minimax
• Complete? Yes (if tree is finite)
•
• Optimal? Yes (against an optimal opponent)
•
• Time complexity? O(bm)
•
• Space complexity? O(bm) (depth-first exploration)
•

• For chess, b ≈ 35, m ≈100 for "reasonable" games


→ exact solution completely infeasible
•
Alpha-Beta pruning
• In minmax search the number of game
states it has to examine is exponential in
the number of moves
• We can not eliminate exponent but we can
cut it in half
• It is possible to compute minmax without
looking at every node in the game tree.
• Alpha-beta pruning is helpful in that.
α-β pruning example
α-β pruning example
α-β pruning example
α-β pruning example
α-β pruning example
Properties of α-β
• Pruning does not affect final result
•

• Good move ordering improves effectiveness of pruning


•

• With "perfect ordering," time complexity = O(bm/2)


→ doubles depth of search
Why is it called α-β?
• α is the value of the
best (i.e., highest-
value) choice found
so far at any choice
point along the path
for max
•
• If v is worse than α,
max will avoid it
•
→ prune that branch

• Define β similarly for


min
The α-β algorithm
The α-β algorithm

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