Hi, if I use minimax with the game othello, how much nodes would my tree create in a 8x8 board without the alpha-beta pruning? Thanks for your attention.

Too many

The actual number depends on how many levels you expand, and the game's current situation, as the number of valid movements can change.

It depends how deep you want you tree to be.

Are you talking about solving the game from move one?

Even if there were only two possible moves per turn, you're looking at 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 positions. (2 ^ (8*8)) Thats 64 pieces placed on the board...

Will

thanks for the reply, i thought my program was at fault, but it seems that it isn´t at afterall..

Just for fun...

If every particle in our Universe were itself a universe with an equivalent number of particles to our own, then in all of those universes, there would be roughly the same number of particles (in total) as there are possible states for that game board! ;)

Furthermore, only a small percentage of solutions are a win for either player. So imagine trying to figure out which of those particles in all of those universes constitute a win for a given player!

That should put the search problem in perspective for you. ;)

Cheers,

Timkin