CS 188 Sp07 Discussion Note Week 6 – Game and Discrete

Probability
by Nuttapong Chentanez

Game Playing

Types: Deterministic or Stochastic? One, two or more players? Perfect

information?
Want an algorithm for calculating a strategy that recommends optimal
move at each state.

Deterministic single player – Just search eg. Freecell, 8-Puzzle, Rubik

Deterministic two players – Minimax Search, pick move that maximize Exercises:
utility against 1. Consider a two-player game featuring a board with four locations,
best play from the opponents numbered 1 through 4 and arranged in a line. Each player has a single
Zero-sum games – One player maximizes the result, the other minimizes token. Player A starts with his token on space 1, and player B starts with
it his token on space 4. Player A moves first

The two players take turns moving, and each player must move his token
to an open adjacent space in either direction. If the opponent occupies an
adjacent space, then a player may jump over the opponent to the next open
space if any. (For example, if A is on 3 and B is on 2, then A may move
back to 1.) The game ends when one player reaches the opposite end of
the board. If player A reaches space 4 first, then the value of the game
is +1; if player B reaches space 1 first, then the value of the game is 1.

May be too slow to go all the way to termination, instead search to a a. Draw the complete game tree, using the following conventions:
limited depth of tree and replace the terminal utilities with an evaluation Write each state as (sA ; sB ) where sA and sB denote the token locations.
function. This loses guarantee of optimal play. Depth = Ply, the more ply Put the terminal states in square boxes, and annotate each with its game
the better (if utilities is reasonable). value in a circle.
Ideal function: Return the true utility of the position (will be optimal Put loop states (states that already appear on the path to the root)
play), only relative ordering is needed. in double square boxes. Since it is not clear how to assign values
to loop states, annotate each with a “?" in a circle.
Alpha-Beta pruning : “If you have an idea which is surely bad, don’t take
time to see how truly awful it is” ~ Pat Winston

b. Now mark each node with its backed-up minimax value (also in a
circle). Explain how you handled the “?" values, and why.

c. Explain why the standard minimax algorithm would fail on this game
tree and sketch how you might fix it, drawing on your answer to (b). Does
How to write min-value function? your modified algorithm give optimal decisions for all games with loops?
Stochastic game: This includes chance node, just take expected value on
the chance not otherwise, the same as minimax. Correct ordering for
utility function does not guarantee optimality anymore.
 Important Rules:
Chain Rules: P(X, Y) = P(X|Y)P(Y)
2. Here is the complete game tree with chance node for a very simple Bayes’s Rule: P(X|Y) = P(Y|X) P(X) / P(Y), very useful in AI
game. Assume that the leaf nodes are to be evaluated in lefttoright order, Axioms of probability
and that before a leaf node is evaluated, assume that we know nothing 1. 0<= P(a) <= 1, for any proposition a,
about its value---the range of possible values is -∞ to ∞. 2. P(true) =1 , P(false) = 1
3. P(a  b) = P(a) + P(b) – P(a  b)

Exercise:
1. Show P(a| a  b) = 1

2. Consider the problem of dealing 5-card poker hands from a

standard deck of 52 cards, assuming that the dealer is fair.
a. How many atomic events are there in the joint
probability distribution (how many 5-card hands are
there)?

a. Mark the value of all the internal nodes and indicate the best move at
the root with an arrow.
b. What is the probability of each atomic event?
b. True/False: Given the values of the first six leaves, the seventh and
eighth leaves are irrelevant and need not be evaluated.
c. What is the probability of dealt a royal straight flush?
c. True/False: Given the values of the first seven leaves, the eighth leaf is Four of a kind?
irrelevant and need not be evaluated.

d. Now suppose all the leaf node values are known to lie between --2 and
2 inclusive. After evaluating the first two leaves, what range of values can 3. From this table:
be deduced for the lefthand chance node? toothache ~ toothache
(i) -2 to 2 (ii) 0 to 1 (iii) 0 to 2 catch ~catch catch ~catch
cavity 0.108 0.012 0.072 0.008
~cavity 0.016 0.064 0.144 0.576
e. Circle all the leaves that need not be evaluated under the assumption in
Compute
d.
a. P(toothache)
b. P(Cavity)
Probability
c. P(Toothache| cavity)
d. P(Cavity| toothache  catch)
Sample Space – Set of all possible outcome of some experiment

Random Variables – Function that assign a value to each outcome in a

sample space
eg. If sample space S is the set of all students in this class, one could
define a random variable A, measuring age. If p is a person, A(p) is his/her
age.

Event - a set of outcomes that share property you are interested in. eg. For
sample space S, J may be the set of juniors. Randomly picking a person
4. After your yearly checkup, the doctor has bad news and good
may pr may not result in the event that he/she is a junior. P(J) denotes the
news. The bad news is that you tested positive for a serious disease
probability that the event J occurs.
and the test is 99% accurate (i.e. The probability of testing positive
Events can be union, intersects, complement to define new events.
when you have the disease is 0.99). The good news is that this is a
Particular conditions on random variables such as A=6’1”, A<7’ can also
rare disease, striking only 1 in 100,000 people of your age. Why is it
be considered an event.
a good news that the disease is rare? What is the chance that you
actually have the disease?
Conditional Probability – P(X|Y) = P(X  Y) / P(Y) is probability that
event X occurs given that event Y occurs

Joint Distribution – P(A = a, B = b) denotes probability that A = a and B

=b

Marginal Distribution – P(A = a) =  P(A = a, B = b) This summation

b
is called “marginalization”

Conditional distribution – P(A = a| B = b) gives conditional probability