Automatic Move Pruning in General Single-Player Games

Abstract

Move pruning is a low-overhead technique for reducing the size of a depth first search tree. The existing algorithm for automatically discovering move pruning information is restricted to games where all moves can be applied to every state. This paper demonstrates an algorithm which handles a general class of single player games. It gives experimental results for our technique, demonstrating both the applicability to a range of games, and the reduction in search tree size. We also provide some conditions under which move pruning is safe, and when it may interfere with other search reduction techniques.