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Subject: Re: Is the crafty approach to pondering the right one?+suggestion

Author: Randall Shane

Date: 14:29:24 05/24/00

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On May 24, 2000 at 17:20:29, Mike S. wrote:

>On May 24, 2000 at 15:36:55, blass uri wrote:
>
>>The program has no idea about the difference between the best move and the
>>second move.
>
>Really not? And how does it choose which is the best one to expect? Maybe I
>would have to be a programmer to understand this. I seem to have a too simple
>idea of a search tree...(?)

Actually, normal alpha-beta searching will find the best move, but it won't find
the second-best move -- to find the best move it's not necessary to rank all the
moves among themselves.  One way to look at alpha-beta searching is you can show
that move A is beterr than either of move B and move C without having to decide
which of B or C takes second place.  A sorting algorithm analogy is that it's
faster to pick out the highest value item in a list than to sort it.



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