Minimaxing

Empirical evidence suggests that searching deeper in game trees using the minimax propagation rule usually improves the quality of decisions significantly. However, despite many recent theoretical analyses of the effects of minimax look-ahead, however, this phenomenon has still not been convincingly explained. Instead, much attention has been given to socalled pathological behavior, which occurs under certain assumptions. This article supports the view that pathology is a direct result of these underlying theoretical assumptions. Pathology does not occur in practice, because these assumptions do not apply in realistic domains.