Author: martin fierz
Date: 09:23:23 01/12/04
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On January 12, 2004 at 12:10:08, Robert Hyatt wrote: [snip] BTW, here's an excerpt from a webpage saying that minimax was not invented by shannon, but earlier (1928) by john von neumann: cheers martin (http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/what_is_AI/What%20is%20AI03.html) "At Bletchley Park Turing illustrated his ideas on machine intelligence by reference to chess. (Ever since, chess and other board games have been regarded as an important test-bed for ideas in AI, since these are a useful source of challenging and clearly defined problems against which proposed methods for problem-solving can be tested.) In principle, a chess-playing computer could play by searching exhaustively through all the available moves, but in practice this is impossible, since it would involve examining an astronomically large number of moves. Heuristics are necessary to guide and to narrow the search. Michie recalls Turing experimenting with two heuristics that later became common in AI, minimax and best-first. The minimax heuristic (described by the mathematician John von Neumann in 1928) involves assuming that one's opponent will move in such a way as to maximise their gains; one then makes one's own move in such a way as to minimise the losses caused by the opponent's expected move. The best-first heuristic involves ranking the moves available to one by means of a rule-of-thumb scoring system and examining the consequences of the highest-scoring move first."
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