Hands-On Artificial Intelligence with Java for Beginners

Introducing the min-max algorithm

In order to understand the min-max algorithm, you should get familiar with game playing and game trees. Game playing can be classified as game trees. What is a game tree? A tree is made of a root node, and a root node has child nodes; each child node is subdivided into multiple children.

This forms a tree, and the terminal nodes are termed leaves, as shown in the following diagram:

In game play, our main goal is to win the game; in other words, we try to find the best possible solution by looking ahead in the game tree. The most important thing to note about playing a game is that we don't actually go down ...