Alpha-beta pruning on evolving game trees

Update Item Information
Publication Type technical report
School or College College of Engineering
Department Computing, School of
Creator Lindstrom, Gary E.
Title Alpha-beta pruning on evolving game trees
Date 1979
Description The alpha-beta strategy is a widely used method for economizing on the size of game trees. Heretofore, its application has been limited to depth-first tree growth in recursive search functions. However, many modern game players use retentive (i.e. coroutine-based) control to achieve greater attention mobility in the game tree, e.g. for heuristically guided "best-first" searching. This paper reformulates the alpha-beta strategy for this generalized control setting. Algorithms are provided (in complete PASCAL code) for the following operations on appropriate nodes arbitrarily selected from a game tree: terminal node expansion, resumption of heuristically suspended move generation, tree re-rooting (i.e. top-level move selection), subtree redevelopment to satisfy a new search thoroughness condition, including restart of nodes that were cut-off but may no longer be. empirical results are presented indicating that, in addition to heuristic freedom, this method typically offers trees with fewer terminal nodes than in the recursive case, due to best-first descendant ordering, and the availability on the average of greater tree context for node cutting.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
First Page 1
Last Page 51
Subject Alpha-beta pruning; Game trees
Subject LCSH Game theory -- Computer programs
Language eng
Bibliographic Citation Lindstrom, G. E. (1979). Alpha-beta pruning on evolving game trees. 1-51. UUCS-79-101.
Series University of Utah Computer Science Technical Report
Relation is Part of ARPANET
Rights Management ©University of Utah
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 20,297,951 bytes
Identifier ir-main,16116
ARK ark:/87278/s62f85kb
Setname ir_uspace
ID 702710
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s62f85kb
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