Question

I’m writing a Othello engine using minimax with alpha-beta pruning.
It’s working ok, but i found the following problem:

When the algorithm finds that a position is lost, it returns -INFINITY as expected, but in
this case i’m not able to track the ‘best’ move…the position is already lost, but it should return a valid move anyway (preferably a move that survives longer, as the good chess engines does).

Here is the code:

private float minimax(OthelloBoard board, OthelloMove best, float alpha, float beta, int depth)
{             
    OthelloMove garbage = new OthelloMove();             
    int currentPlayer = board.getCurrentPlayer();

    if (board.checkEnd())
    {                        
        int bd = board.countDiscs(OthelloBoard.BLACK);
        int wd = board.countDiscs(OthelloBoard.WHITE);

        if ((bd > wd) && currentPlayer == OthelloBoard.BLACK)                
            return INFINITY;
        else if ((bd < wd) && currentPlayer == OthelloBoard.BLACK)                           
            return -INFINITY;            
        else if ((bd > wd) && currentPlayer == OthelloBoard.WHITE)                            
            return -INFINITY;            
        else if ((bd < wd) && currentPlayer == OthelloBoard.WHITE)                            
            return INFINITY;            
        else                             
            return 0.0f;            
    }
    //search until the end? (true during end game phase)
    if (!solveTillEnd )
    {
        if (depth == maxDepth)
            return OthelloHeuristics.eval(currentPlayer, board);
    }

    ArrayList<OthelloMove> moves = board.getAllMoves(currentPlayer);             

    for (OthelloMove mv : moves)
    {                        
        board.makeMove(mv);            
        float score = - minimax(board, garbage, -beta,  -alpha, depth + 1);           
        board.undoMove(mv);             

        if(score > alpha)
        {  
            //Set Best move here
            alpha = score;                
            best.setFlipSquares(mv.getFlipSquares());
            best.setIdx(mv.getIdx());        
            best.setPlayer(mv.getPlayer());                              
        }

        if (alpha >= beta)
            break;                

    }                
    return alpha;
}

I call it using:

AI ai = new AI(board, maxDepth, solveTillEnd);

//create empty (invalid) move to hold best move
OthelloMove bestMove = new OthelloMove();
ai.bestFound = bestMove;
ai.minimax(board, bestMove, -INFINITY, INFINITY, 0);

//dipatch a Thread
 new Thread(ai).start();
//wait for thread to finish

OthelloMove best = ai.bestFound();

When a lost position (imagine it’s lost 10 moves later for example) is searched, best variable above is equal to the empty invalid move passed as argument…why??

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Your problem is that you’re using -INFINITY and +INFINITY as win/loss scores. You should have scores for win/loss that are higher/lower than any other positional evaluation score, but not equal to your infinity values. This will guarantee that a move will be chosen even in positions that are hopelessly lost.