Alpha-beta pruning for Minimax

Question

I have spent a whole day trying to implement minimax without really understanding it. Now, , I think I understand how minimax works, but not alpha-beta pruning.

Thi

Answer 1

Here's a short answer -- you can know the value of a node without computing the precise value of all its children.

As soon as we know that a child node cannot be better, from the perspective of the parent-node player, than the previously evaluated sibling nodes, we can stop evaluating the child subtree. It's at least this bad.