Adversary Search

  • So far, we have only fought the instance

  • Consider a two-player game with:

    • Perfect knowledge (for now)

    • No "luck" (for now)

    • Turn-based

    • Always ends

    • Well-defined final score + "zero sum"

  • Examples: Checkers, Chess, Connect-4, Tic-Tac-Toe

  • We can use state-space search to find "good" or maybe even "best" plays in that game at a given state

Game State Space

  • State:

    • "Board" position (where are the checkers)

    • Side on move (red or black)

    • Maybe history of game (ugh, not checkers)

  • State space is directed, neighbors are states after legal moves

  • State space may be cyclic (which is where history rules sometimes come from)

Zero-Sum and Negamax

  • Minimax Theorem (Von Neumann, Nash): Any state in the game has a well-defined value assuming "best play" by both sides

  • Basic Negamax idea:

    • Choose a next state with minimum value for opponent (moves are boring)

    • Determine this by valuing each opponent state from opponent's point of view (recursively)

    • Zero-sum, so your value = negation of opponent's value

    • Thus, pick state that maximizes negation of opponent's value

negamax search tree

Win Pruning

  • If on some search you find a move (successor state) that is a win for the side on move — no point in searching further

  • This is true whether the win is immediate or by forced play

  • Can remove an "exponential" number of states from the search

Game Value

  • Value of a game is value of starting state to side on move

    • Game's value is value of starting state

    • Game is "solved" if the value of every state is known (recorded or trivially calculated)

    • Game is "weakly solved" if the value of every state that could occur in perfect play is known

  • Value is known: Hex

  • Weakly solved: Checkers

  • Solved: Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect-4, Awari, many others

The Game of "15"

  • Game I found in some old Martin Gardner book

  • Rules:

    • Start with tiles labeled 1-9 in the center

    • Players take turns choosing a tile from the pile

    • Any time a player holds 3 tiles whose total is 15, they win

  • Perfect information, alternating, terminating, zero-sum: check

  • (There's a fantastic trick to playing this game)

Solving "15"

  • Build a negamax search http://github.com/pdx-cs-ai/nkt

  • Can cheaply calculate value of any position in practice

  • Or can calculate the value of all possible positions and record them

    • (How many possible positions are there?)

"NKT": Generalizing "15"

  • We will generalize to "NKT": N tiles, exactly K tiles in a win, winning total is T

  • Next natural size is N=15, K=4, T=28, so we'll call this game "28"

  • Calculating the value of the starting position is going to take a long time

Depth-limited Negamax Search

  • We want an approximate value for a position, and will tolerate an approximately best move

  • For chess, we use "piece value" as a heuristic approximation. For "28", maybe number of "almost wins"?

  • Heuristic should look at both sides, so subtract on-move value from opponent

  • But just doing this right away might not be the best plan. Let's look ahead some fixed depth and use negamax to combine heuristic values

  • 28 or fewer possible almost-wins, so we'll set the value of an actual win to 29

Alpha-Beta Pruning

  • Generalization of Win Pruning. Hard to explain:

    • Imagine you find a forced score of 3 for some state s in the middle of the search

    • Imagine further that in some earlier state t at the same level you had found a score of 2

    • Then your opponent (parent) would never let you get to s: they would avoid it

    • So there's no point in searching s any further

alpha-beta search tree

Alpha-Beta Implementation

  • "Alpha-Beta window" keeps track of best score for side not on move (alpha) and side on move (beta)

  • Prune when computed score exceeds beta

  • Game is zero-sum. On recursion, flip and negate the window: (alpha, beta) → (-beta, -alpha)

  • Window starts with (-max, max). When searching, keep bumping alpha up as better moves are found

Effectiveness of Alpha-Beta

  • Depends on move ordering: a good move for the side on move will "close the window" a lot, so want to try good moves first

  • With optimal move ordering, will effectively double the depth of the search by pruning; runtime of depth-4 without = runtime of depth-8 with

  • Note that alpha-beta never changes the answer: it only prunes states that provably don't matter

Last modified: Monday, 21 October 2019, 2:58 PM