Search versus knowledge an empirical study of minimax on krk.pdfVIP

SEARCH VERSUS KNOWLEDGE: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF MINIMAX ON KRK A. Sadikov, I. Bratko, I. Kononenko University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Tržaška 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia aleksander.sadikov@fri.uni-lj.si Abstract This article presents the results of an empirical experiment designed to gain insight into what is the effect of the minimax algorithm on the evaluation function. The experiment’s simulations were performed upon the KRK chess endgame. Our results show that dependencies between evaluations of sibling nodes in a game tree and an abundance of possibilities to commit blunders present in the KRK endgame are not sufficient to explain the success of the minimax principle in practical game-playing as was previously believed. The article shows that minimax in combination with a noisy evaluation function introduces a bias into the backed-up evaluations and argues that this bias is what masked the effectiveness of the minimax in previous studies. Keywords: minimax principle, KRK chess endgame, evaluation-function quality, bias 1. Introduction Over twenty years ago Beal (1980) set out to analyze whether and why values backed up from minimax search are more trustworthy than the heuristic values themselves. He constructed a simple mathematical model to analyze the minimax algorithm. To his surprise the analysis of the model showed that the backed-up values were actually somewhat less trustworthy than the heuristic values themselves. He then wrote: “This result is disappointing. It was hoped that the analysis would show that the prob