Study and improvement of search algorithms in two-players perfect information games

Search algorithms in games are artificial intelligence methods for playing such games. Unfortunately, there is no study on these algorithms that evaluates the generality of their performance. We propose to address this gap in the case of two-player zero-sum games with perfect information. Furthermore, we propose a new search algorithm and we show that, for a short search time, it outperforms all studied algorithms on all games in this large experiment and that, for a medium search time, it outperforms all studied algorithms on 17 of the 22 studied games.1. Introduction Games have numerous applications, far beyond the obvious ones (the video game and board game industries) and the slightly less obvious ones (economics, defense, and also education through serious games). In fact, all computational problems can naturally be reformulated in terms of games. Game search algorithms are therefore general-purpose artificial intelligence techniques for problem-solving.