A Comparison of Algorithms for Multi-player Games

The max n algorithm for playing multi-player games is flexible, but there are only limited techniques for pruning max n game trees. This paper presents other theoretical limitations of the max n algorithm, namely that tie-breaking strategies are crucial to max n , and that zero-window search is not possible in max n game trees. We also present quantitative results derived from playing max n and the paranoid algorithm (Sturtevant and Korf, 2000) against each other on various multi-player game domains, showing that paranoid widely outperforms max n in Chinese checkers, by a lesser amount in Hearts and that they are evenly matched in Spades. We also confirm the expected results for the asymptotic branching factor improvements of the paranoid algorithm over max n .