Author: Tim Foden
Date: 06:31:59 08/04/00
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Hi Larry, On August 04, 2000 at 08:38:27, Larry Griffiths wrote: >I see that my moves have dropped from 1.6 million to 800,000 moves per second >after adding what appears to be a simple alpha-beta algorithm. Is there an >explanation of the alpha-beta alorithm that a 3 year old could understand :) When I was attempting to write a program to play Othello (same as Reversi), I happened to be at Polytechnic. The Poly had a fair library, and I did quite a bit of research in the Artifical Intelligence Journal. I photocopied any articles that I thought may come in useful. I have one entitled: "An Analysis of Alpha-Beta Pruning" by Donald E. Knuth and Ronald W. Moore. Its Abstract reads: "The alpha-beta technique of game trees is analysed, in an attempt to provide some insight into its behaviour. The first portion of this paper is an expository presentation of the method together with a proof of its correctness and a historical discussion. The alpha-beta procedure is shown to be optimal in a certain sense, and bounds are obtained for its running time with various kinds of random data." The article is from AI 6 (1975,. pp293-326. If you have a good technical library nearby you could go and look it up! :) My photocopies only have the 9 pages of the article, but this includes explanations and pseudo code for the algorithm. They are missing the test result data showing bounds. If you like I'll scan them in and e-mail them to you? I also have some other articles: "A World Championship Level Othello Program" "SSS* - A Best First Search for Optimal Playing Strategies" "The Development of a World Class Othello Program" Cheers, Tim.
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