MiniMax as applied to Artificial Intelligence

Mark will be talking about the family of algorithms known as MiniMax as applied to Artificial Intelligence. This is an old algorithm and there is no specific paper to read from. As references we can start with the wikipedia article on MiniMax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax and on the extended algorithm we will discuss called Alpha-Beta Pruning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha%E2%80%93beta_pruning.

We will discuss these algorithms within the scope of 2 player grid games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Isolation. We will see how these algorithms are motivated by game theory, and how a good heuristic is important for making them work in the real world where we don’t have infinite compute resources.

And hopefully we’ll have some show-and-tell with some computers and stuff pitting different algorithms against each other!

Food this month is sponsored by Capnion, Inc. Thanks to them for feeding us at the meetup!