Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 12:25:51 02/12/04
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On February 12, 2004 at 14:33:53, William H Rogers wrote: >On February 12, 2004 at 14:03:49, Dann Corbit wrote: > >>If you understood how the algorithm worked, you would be standing in admiration >>of it (as opposed to worship). Making light of the algorithm is silly to me. >>The current alternative is minimax. > >Hi Dan >I take a little exception with the statement that minimax is an alternative to >alpha-beta. I never said it was a good alternative. >They are the same thing just expressed a little differently. In the same way that a linear search of an unsorted list is the same as a binary search of a sorted list. Both accomplish the exact some thing, but one way is a lot faster (depending on circumstances it could be either the linear search or the binary search). >As an example here are some of the steps I went through when I first started to >write my chess program. >First I designed the board, easy part. Then I started working on the move >generator. I designed and wrote a subroutine for moving pawns. Next I did the >same thing for the knights, then bishops, then rooks and by the time I started >to write the code for the queen I realized that last three subs were all the >same with just minor changes in the directions and number of moves that could be >made in each direction. I thought about it and came up with indices. One >subroutine used for all the major pieces with pointers to the direction and >steps indices. Tremendous savings in coding. Basically what I am saying is the >the minimax does not do anything any differently than alpha-beta, it is just a >more efficent and smaller coding that achieves the same results. Take one >program and only make changes to which one that you want to use and I think that >you will not see any difference in the evals or the moves chosen as best. >Respectfully >Bill
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