Alpha Beta Pruning

#DigitalGarden

What is Alpha Beta Pruning

Important

It is a type of search time minimizing method that prunes forests or trees such that certain branches of nodes are not considered anymore by following a specific algorithm

The rules and constraints are as follows:

Take the following figure for example to see how this logic is implemented:

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To conclude, what makes an alpha-beta pruning algorithm efficient is the fact that it can prune off branches that it does not need based on the simple logic "αβ", hence making it such that when a node has an alpha value greater than a beta or equal to it, the branches following will not be considered.