Game Playing

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Game Playing

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• CS440/ECE448
• Lecture 7
• FIRST HOMEWORK
• DUE TODAY

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Last lecture

• Constraint satisfaction problems
• Line-drawing interpretation
• This lecture
• Games
• Minimax
• ?? pruning
• Reading
• Chapter 6

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Line Drawing Interpretation

• Goal Given a line drawing of a 3-D
• object, label edges as being
• Convex
• Concave -
• Occluding

-
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Constraints (Junction Labels)
Complete junction catalog for line drawings of
trihedral-vertex polyhedra
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Nonsense objects

• A consistent labeling is a necessary condition
  for a line drawing to correspond to a physically
  realizable object (e.g. a polyhedron with
  trihedral vertices)

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Types of Games
Chance
Deterministic
Chess, Checkers Go, Othello Backgammon, Monopoly
Battleship Bridge, Poker, Scrabble, Nuclear war
Perfect Information
Imperfect Information
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Games vs. search problems

• Unpredictable opponent
• ? solution is a contingency plan.
• Time limits ? unlikely to find goal, must
  approximate.
• Plan of attack
• algorithm for perfect play Von Neumann, 1944
• finite horizon, approximate evaluation Zuse,
  1945 Shannon, 1950 Samuel, 1952-57
• pruning to reduce costs McCarthy, 1956.

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Deterministic Two-person Games

• Two players move in turn.
• Each Player knows what the other has done and can
  do.
• Either one of the players wins (and the other
  loses) or there is a draw.

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Games as Search Grundys Game Nilsson, Chapter
3

• Initially a stack of pennies stands between two
  players.
• Each player divides one of the current stacks
  into two unequal stacks.
• The game ends when every stack contains one or
  two pennies.
• The first player who cannot play loses.
• Min starts. Can we devise a winning strategy for
  Max?

MAX
MIN
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Grundys Game States
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Mins turn
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When is there a winning strategy for Max?

• When it is MINs turn to play, a win must be
  obtainable for MAX from all the results of the
  move.
• When it is MAXs turn, a win must be obtainable
  from at least one of the results of the move.

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Minimax

• Initial state Board position and whose turn it
  is.
• Operators Legal moves that the player can make.
• Terminal test A test of the state to determine
  if game is over set of states satisfying
  terminal test are terminal states.
• Utility function numeric value for outcome of
  game (leaf nodes).
• E.g. 1 win, -1 loss, 0 draw.
• E.g. of points scored if tallying points as in
  backgammon.
• Assumption Opponent will always chose operator
  (move) to maximize own utility.

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Minimax

• Perfect play for deterministic,
  perfect-information games.
• Maxs strategy choose action with highest
  minimax value
• ) best achievable payoff against best play by
  min.
• Consider a 2-ply (two step) game
• Max wants largest outcome --- Min wants
  smallest.

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Properties of Minimax

• Complete
• Optimal
• Time complexity
• Space complexity

Yes, if tree is finite. Yes, against an optimal
opponent. Otherwise?? O(bm). O(bm).

• Note For chess, b ? 35, m ? 100 for a
  reasonable game.
• Solution is completely infeasible
• Actually only 1040 board positions, not 35100

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Resource limits

• Suppose we have 100 seconds, explore 104
  nodes/second
• ? 106 nodes per move.
• Standard approach
• cutoff test
• e.g., depth limit,
• evaluation function estimated desirability of
  position
• (an approximation to the utility used in minimax).

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Cutting off search

• Replace MinimaxValue with MinimaxCutoff .
• MinimaxCutoff is identical to MinimaxValue except
• 1. Terminal? is replaced by Cutoff?
• 2. Utility is replaced by Eval.
• Does it work in practice?
• bm 106, b35 ? m4
• 4-ply lookahead is a hopeless chess player!
• 4-ply human novice
• 8-ply typical PC, human master
• 12-ply Deep Blue, Kasparov

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Evaluation Function

• For chess, typically linear weighted
• sum of features
• Eval(s) w1 f1(s) w2 f2(s) ... wn fn(s)
• e.g., w1 9 with
• f1(s) (number of white queens) - (number of
  black queens)
• w2 5 with
• f2(s) (number of white rooks) - (number of
  black rooks)

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Digression Exact Values Don't Matter
MAX MIN

• Behavior is preserved under any monotonic
  transformation of Eval.
• Only the order matters
• payoff in deterministic games acts as an ordinal
  utility function.

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Horizon effect

• Bad news may be hidden beyond the cutoff depth.

Black to move..
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Another idea

• ?? Pruning
• Essential idea is to stop searching down a branch
  of tree when you can determine that it is a dead
  end.

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??? Pruning Example
? 3
MAX
3
MIN
12
8
3
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How is the search tree pruned?

• ? is the best value (to MAX) found so far.
• If V ? ?, then the subtree containing V will
  have utility no greater than V.
• ? Prune that branch
• ? can be defined similarly from MINs
  perspective.

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Properties of ???

• Pruning does not affect final result.
• Good move ordering improves effectiveness of
  pruning.
• With perfect ordering, time complexity
  O(bm/2)
• doubles depth of search
• can easily reach depth 8 and play good chess.
• A simple example of the value of reasoning about
  which
• computations are relevant (a form of
  metareasoning).

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Deterministic games in practice

• Checkers In 1994 Chinook ended 40-year-reign of
  human world champion Marion Tinsley. Used an
  endgame database defining perfect play for all
  positions involving 8 or fewer pieces on the
  board, a total of 443,748,401,247 positions.
• Chess Deep Blue defeated human world champion
  Gary Kasparov in a six-game match in 1997. Deep
  Blue searches 200 million positions per second,
  uses very sophisticated evaluation, and
  undisclosed methods for extending some lines of
  search up to 40 ply.
• Othello Human champions refuse to compete
  against computers, who are too good.
• Go Human champions refuse to compete against
  computers, who are too bad. In Go, b gt 300, so
  most programs use pattern knowledge bases to
  suggest plausible moves.