Aspiration window - Misplaced Pages

Search heuristic for combinatorial games

An aspiration window is a heuristic used in pair with alpha-beta pruning in order to reduce search time for combinatorial games by supplying a window (or range) around an estimated score guess. Use of an aspiration window allows alpha-beta search to compete in the terms of efficiency against other pruning algorithms.

Alpha-beta pruning achieves its performance by using cutoffs from its original range. Aspiration windows take advantage of this by supplying a smaller initial window, which increases the amount of cutoffs and therefore efficiency.

However, due to search instability, the score may not always be in the window range. This may lead to a costly re-search that can penalize performance. Despite this, popular engines such as Stockfish still use aspiration windows.

The guess that aspiration windows use is usually supplied by the last iteration of iterative deepening.

References

Sources

Shams, Reza; Kaindl, Hermann; Horacek, Helmut (August 1991). "Using aspiration windows for minimax algorithms" (PDF). IJCAI'91: Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 1: 192–197.

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Definitions	Congestion game Cooperative game Determinacy Escalation of commitment Extensive-form game First-player and second-player win Game complexity Graphical game Hierarchy of beliefs Information set Normal-form game Preference Sequential game Simultaneous game Simultaneous action selection Solved game Succinct game Mechanism design
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Theorems	Aumann's agreement theorem Folk theorem Minimax theorem Nash's theorem Negamax theorem Purification theorem Revelation principle Sprague–Grundy theorem Zermelo's theorem
Key figures	Albert W. Tucker Amos Tversky Antoine Augustin Cournot Ariel Rubinstein Claude Shannon Daniel Kahneman David K. Levine David M. Kreps Donald B. Gillies Drew Fudenberg Eric Maskin Harold W. Kuhn Herbert Simon Hervé Moulin John Conway Jean Tirole Jean-François Mertens Jennifer Tour Chayes John Harsanyi John Maynard Smith John Nash John von Neumann Kenneth Arrow Kenneth Binmore Leonid Hurwicz Lloyd Shapley Melvin Dresher Merrill M. Flood Olga Bondareva Oskar Morgenstern Paul Milgrom Peyton Young Reinhard Selten Robert Axelrod Robert Aumann Robert B. Wilson Roger Myerson Samuel Bowles Suzanne Scotchmer Thomas Schelling William Vickrey
Search optimizations	Alpha–beta pruning Aspiration window Principal variation search max^n algorithm Paranoid algorithm Lazy SMP
Miscellaneous	Bounded rationality Combinatorial game theory Confrontation analysis Coopetition Evolutionary game theory Glossary of game theory List of game theorists List of games in game theory No-win situation Topological game Tragedy of the commons

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Sources