Search Vs Knowledge: Empirical Study of Minimax on Krk Endgame

This article presents the results of an empirical experiment designed to gain insight into what is the effect of the minimax on the evaluation function. The experiment’s simulations were performed upon the KRK chess endgame. Main result is that dependencies between evaluations of sibling nodes in a game tree and an abundance of possibilities to commit blunders present in the KRK endgame are not enough to explain the success of the minimax in practical game-playing as was previously believed. The article argues that correlation between a high branching factor in the game tree and having a winning move available is something that minimax implicitly takes into account and that this is at least partially responsible for its success. Second part of the article presents ‘weighted minimax’, an attempt at exploiting dependencies between evaluations of sibling nodes in a game tree and shows that its results could be promising.