Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 10:01:33 01/12/04
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On January 12, 2004 at 12:23:23, martin fierz wrote: >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." OK. I'll certainly take that as written. I have not read Shannon's paper in many years, but will make it a point to do so soon. Perhaps his paper was written _around_ minmax, but specifically discussed such ideas as search extensions and the like (Type-A vs Type-B)...
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