Why Search?
Well, basically, because we are not smart enough to do without it. A really bright program might be able to look at a board position and determine who is ahead, by how much, and what sort of plan should be implemented to drive the advantage to fruition. Unfortunately, there are so many patterns to discern, so many rules and so many exceptions, that even the cleverest programs just aren't very good at this sort of thing. What they are good at, however, is computing fast. Therefore, instead of trying to figure out good moves just by looking at a board, chess programs use their brute force to do it: look at every move, then at every possible countermove by the opponent, etc., until the processor melts down. Deep searches are an easy way to "teach" the machine about relatively complicated tactics. For example, consider the knight fork, a move which places a knight on a square from which it can attack two different pieces (say, a rook and the queen). Finding a way to represent this type of position logically would require some effort, more so if we also had to determine whether the knight was itself protected from capture. However, a plain dumb 3-ply search will "learn" the value of a fork on its own: it will eventually try to move the knight to the forking square, will test all replies to this attack, and then capture one of the undefended pieces, changing the board's material balance. And since a full-width search looks at everything, it will never miss an opportunity: if there is a 5-move combination, however obscure, that leads to checkmate or to a queen capture, the machine will see it if its search is deep enough. Therefore, the deeper the search, the more complicated the "plans" which the machine can stumble upon.Grandpa MiniMax
The basic idea underlying all two-agent search algorithms is Minimax. It dates back from the Dark Ages; I believe Von Neumann himself first described it over 60 years ago. Minimax can be defined as follows:- Assume that there is a way to evaluate a board position so that we know whether Player 1 (whom we will call Max) is going to win, whether his opponent (Min) will, or whether the position will lead to a draw. This evaluation takes the form of a number: a positive number indicates that Max is leading, a negative number, that Min is ahead, and a zero, that nobody has acquired an advantage.
- Max's job is to make moves which will increase the board's evaluation (i.e., he will try to maximize the evaluation).
- Min's job is to make moves which decrease the board's evaluation (i.e., he will try to minimize it).
- Assume that both players play flawlessly, i.e., that they never make any mistakes and always make the moves that improve their respective positions the most.
Max assumes that Min will always play perfectly. Therefore, he knows that, if he makes move A, his opponent will reply with D, resulting in a final evaluation of -2 (i.e., a win for Min). However, if Max plays B, he is sure to win, because Min's best move still results in a positive final value of 5. So, by the Minimax algorithm, Max will always choose to play B, even though he would score a bigger victory if he played A and Min made a mistake!
The trouble with Minimax, which may not be immediately obvious from such a small example, is that there is an exponential number of possible paths which must be examined. This means that effort grows dramatically with:
- The number of possible moves by each player, called the branching factor and noted B.
- The depth of the look-ahead, noted d, and usually described as "N-ply", where N is an integer number and "ply" means one move by one player. For example, the mini-game described above is searched to a depth of 2-ply, one move per player.
Alphabeta: Making Minimax Feasible (a little)
Suppose that you have already searched Max' move B in the mini-game above. Therefore, you know that, at best, Max' score for the entire game will be 5. Now, suppose that you begin searching move A, and that you start with the path A-D. This path results in a score of -2. For Max, this is terrible: if he plays A, he is sure to finish with, at best, -2, because Min plays perfectly; if A-C results in a score higher than A-D's, Min will play A-D, and if A-C should be even worse (say, -20), Min would take that path instead. Therefore, there is no need to look at A-C, or at any other path resulting from move A: Max must play B, because the search has already proven that A will end up being a worse choice no matter what happens. This is the basic idea being the alphabeta algorithm: once you have a good move, you can quickly eliminate alternatives that lead to disaster. And there are a lot of those! When combined with the transposition table we discussed earlier in the series, and which saves us from examining positions twice if they can be reached by different combinations of moves, alphabeta turns on the Warp drive: in the best case, it will only need to examine roughly twice the square root of the number of nodes searched by pure Minimax, which is about 2,500 instead of 1.5 million in the example above.Ordering Moves to Optimize Alphabeta
But how can we achieve this best case scenario? Do we even need to? Not really. It turns out that Alphabeta is always very efficient at pruning the search tree, as long as it can quickly find a pretty good move to compare others to. This means that it is important to search a good move first; the best case happens when we always look at the best possible moves before any others. In the worst possible case, however, the moves are searched in increasing order of value, so that each one is always better than anything examined before; in this situation, alphabeta can't prune anything and the search degenerates into pure, wasteful Minimax. Ordering the moves before search is therefore very important. Picking moves at random just won't do; we need a "smarter" way to do the job. Unfortunately, if there was an easy way to know what the best move would turn out to be, there would be no need to search in the first place! So we have to make do with a "best guess". Several techniques have been developed to order the possible moves in as close to an optimal sequence as possible:- Apply the evaluation function to the positions resulting from the moves, and sort them. Intuitively, this makes sense, and the better the evaluation function, the more effective this method should be. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well at all for chess, because as we will see next month, many positions just can't be evaluated accurately!
- Try to find a move which results in a position already stored in the transposition table; if its value is good enough to cause a cutoff, no search effort needs to be expended.
- Try certain types of moves first. For example, having your queen captured is rarely a smart idea, so checking for captures first may reveal "bonehead" moves rapidly.
- Extend this idea to any move which has recently caused a cutoff at the same level in the search tree. This "killer heuristic" is based on the fact that many moves are inconsequential: if your queen is en prise, it doesn't matter whether you advance your pawn at H2 by one or two squares; the opponent will still take the queen. Therefore, if the move "bishop takes queen" has caused a cutoff during the examination of move H2-H3, it might also cause one during the examination of H2-H4, and should be tried first.
- Extend the killer heuristic into a history table. If, during the course of the game's recent development, moving a piece from G2 to E4 has proven effective, then it is likely that doing so now would still be useful (even if the old piece was a bishop and has been replaced by a queen), because conditions elsewhere on the board probably haven't changed that much. The history heuristic is laughably simple to implement, needing only a pair of 64x64 arrays of integer counters, and yields very interesting results.
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