Search in Adversarial Games
Non-adversarial game: you make a sequence of moves, and at the end you get a payoff depending on the state you are in
- games of perfect information: deterministic moves (FreeCell)
- games against nature: you make a move, “nature” changes the world
- same as perfect information if nature is perfectly predictable, but more generally probabilistic (stochastic next state generator)
- but, we assume that nature is dispassionate: her choice of move is not meant to minimize your payoff
- adversarial games: you make a move, then an opponent makes a move, then both get a payoff (possibly negative)
- both you and opponent are attempting to maximize an individual payoff function
- often maximizing one means minimizing the other
- perfect information: everybody knows all payoff functions