Uri Blass wrote:As H.G.Muller explained you do not have to have a pure minimax.
He suggested putting single-core alpha-beta searches on top of a plain minimax tree for the plies close to the root.
If you can use million cores then
even better may be putting some clusters of 40 cores that use alpha beta on a top of a plain minimax tree for the plies close to the root.
everyone of the clusters can simply analyze a different position that is 3 or even 4 plies after the root and based on all the scores from all the clusters you may be able to get a move.
It wouldn't work for a bunch of reasons. The main is unbalanced tree (1. move tree is bigger than the size of all other moves combined), and that most of the cores would search nodes that would already be cut-off (if you had alpha-beta everywhere).
Try suggesting something like that to Bob and see what he would tell you .
Now consider a 10,000 processor array running plain minimax. It will search as deeply as the A/B system in about the same time. If the mean branching factor in the minimax search is about 32, then increasing the minimax searcher processor count by a factor of 32 will make the system see an extra ply. But increasing the A/B system processor count by the same factor will not help it. At some point, the minimax array will became smarter than the A/B searcher.
Actually i think about this for GPU Chess....MiniMax with some bad organized AlphaBeta Pruning.
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