Adversarial search

In games such as chess, there is a game tree of all possible moves by both players and the resulting board configurations, and we can search this tree to find an effective playing strategy. This type of problem has the unique characteristic that we must account for any possible move our opponent might make. To account for this, game-playing computer programs, as well as other forms of artificial intelligence like machine planning, often use search algorithms like the minimax algorithm, search tree pruning, and alpha-beta pruning.