Abstract
This paper describes comparisons of the minimax back-up rule and the product back-up rule on a wide variety of games, including P-games, G-games, three-hole kalah, othello, and Ballard’s incremental game. In three-hole kalah, the product rule plays better than a minimax search to the same depth. This is a remarkable result, since it is the first widely known game in which product has been found to yield better play than minimax. Furthermore, the relative performance of minimax and product is related to a parameter called the rate of heuristic flaw (rhf). Thus, rhf has potential use in predicting when to use a back-up rule other than minimax.
A condensed version of this paper, entitled “Comparing Minimax and Product in a Variety of Games”, appears in Proc. AAAI-87.
This work has been supported in part by a Systems Research Center fellowship.
This work has been supported in part by the following sources: an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award to Dana Nau, NSF NSFD CDR-85-00108 to the University of Maryland Systems Research Center, IBM Research, and General Motors Research Laboratories.
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© 1988 Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
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Chi, PC., Nau, D.S. (1988). Comparison of the Minimax and Product Back-Up Rules in a Variety of Games. In: Kanal, L., Kumar, V. (eds) Search in Artificial Intelligence. Symbolic Computation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8788-6_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8788-6_13
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