Alpha-beta pruning

Alpha-beta pruning is a search algorithm which seeks to reduce the number of nodes that are evaluated by the minimax algorithm in its search tree.

Alpha-beta pruning eliminates parts of the tree that are poor path choices relative to other pathways.

Alpha-Beta Pruning
One of the most elegant of all AI search algorithms is alpha-beta pruning.

Alpha-beta pruning can be explained simply as a technique for not exploring those branches of a search tree that analysis indicates not to be of further interest either to the player making the analysis (this is obvious) or to his opponent (and this ...

Use of alpha-beta pruning combined with a number of search heuristics dramatically improved the performance of brute-force search algorithms.

Effectiveness of alpha-beta pruning algorithm
The effectiveness of alpha-beta depends on the ordering in which the successors are examined.

Minimax Trees and Alpha-Beta Pruning
Moving on to another genre of games completely - board games.

Alpha-beta pruning is a search algorithm that reduces the number of nodes that need to be evaluated in the search tree by the minimax algorithm. ... Look up Premise in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

3 Alpha-Beta Pruning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
5.4 Imperfect Real-Time Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171
5.5 Stochastic Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dynamic programming
Operations research
Alpha-beta pruning (a specialised version of branch-and-bound for minimax problems)
Branch - Example Usage ...

Although in the same category of games as chess (i.e two player, rule-based, perfect information, zero sum games), Go is too difficult a game for ordinary game AI techniques (namely minimax with alpha-beta pruning) to be enough.

See also: Pruning, Alpha, Minimax, Artificial intelligence, Branch