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Subject: Re: Minimal alpha-beta tree

Author: Ricardo Gibert

Date: 20:38:34 03/31/04

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On March 31, 2004 at 23:33:00, Mike Siler wrote:

>On March 31, 2004 at 20:17:16, Dan Honeycutt wrote:
>
>>On March 31, 2004 at 20:04:20, Mike Siler wrote:
>>
>>>If I recall correctly, Knuth and Moore showed that the minimum number of leaf
>>>nodes the standard alpha-beta algorithm will examine when searching to depth d
>>>given a fixed branching factor of w is
>>>
>>>w^Floor(d/2) + w^Ceiling(d/2) + 1
>>>
>>>However, in the paper "Multi-Cut Alpha Beta Pruning in Game Tree Search" which
>>>can be found at http://digilander.libero.it/gargamellachess/papers.htm under
>>>Pruning, there is a diagram of a minimal game tree with fixed branching factor
>>>of 3 and fixed depth of 3 plies. In the diagram, a total of 11 leaf nodes are
>>>examined. When I plugged in some values for the leaf nodes and traced through
>>>the algorithm, I got the same number. But if you use the formula above, you get:
>>>
>>>3^Floor(3/2) + 3^Ceiling(3/2) + 1 = 3^1 + 3^2 + 1 = 13
>>>
>>>Why the discrepancy? Also, does anyone know how this formula was found/proven or
>>>where I can find this?
>>>
>>>Michael
>>
>>is not the formula:
>>w^Floor(d/2) + w^Ceiling(d/2) - 1
>>
>>Dan H.
>
>I thought it was +1, which is also what Dr. Hyatt said in a post within the past
>couple of days.

Just plug in d=0 and d=1 to see for yourself whether it ought to be +1 or -1.

>
>Michael



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