The minimax algorithm, also called the negamax algorithm, remains today the most widely used search technique for two-player perfect-information games. However, minimaxing has been shown to be susceptible to game tree pathology, a paradoxical situation in which the accuracy of the search can decrease as the height of the tree increases. Althöfer’s alternative minimax algorithm has been proven t...

This paper presents techniques designed to minimise the number of states which are explored during subgraph isomorphism detection. A set of advanced topological node features, calculated from nneighbourhood graphs, is presented and shown to outperform existing features. Further, the pruning effectiveness of both the new and existing topological node features is significantly improved through th...

Mining large-scale text corpora is an essential step in extracting the key themes in a corpus. We motivate a quantitative measure for significant associations through the distributions of pairs and triplets of co-occurring words. We consider the algorithmic problem of efficiently enumerating such significant associations and present pruning algorithms for these problems, with theoretical as wel...

We introduce a new form of game search called partition search that incorporates dependency analysis, allowing substantial reductions in the portion of the tree that needs to be expanded. Both theoretical results and experimental data are presented. For the game of bridge, partition search provides approximately as much of an improvement over existing methods as a-0 pruning provides over minimax.

BACKGROUND Fusion of lumbar spine segments is a well-established therapy for many pathologies. The procedure changes the biomechanics of the spine. Initial clinical benefits may be outweighed by ensuing damage to the adjacent segments. Various surgical devices and techniques have been developed to prevent this deterioration. "Topping off" systems combine rigid fusion with a flexible pedicle scr...

The focus here is on learning by school-age children, assisted by the family and/ or peers, and supported and managed by professional teachers. Keith Topping, who specialises in researching paired learning, provides an outline of the essential concepts of peer-assisted and parent-assisted learning, followed by discussion of some specific practical evidence of its use in reading, writing, spelli...

Prism is a modular classification rule generation method based on the ‘separate and conquer’ approach that is alternative to the rule induction approach using decision trees also known as ‘divide and conquer’. Prism often achieves a similar level of classification accuracy compared with decision trees, but tends to produce a more compact noise tolerant set of classification rules. As with other...

Progressive Pruning (PP) is used in the Monte-Carlo go playing program Indigo. For each candidate move, PP launches random games starting with this move. PP gathers statistics on moves, and it prunes moves statistically inferior to the best one [5]. This papers yields two new pruning techniques: Miai Pruning (MP) and Set Pruning (SP). In MP the second move of the random games is selected at ran...

Effective pruning is essential for efficient iceberg cube computation. Previous studies have focused on exclusive pruning: regions of a search space that do not satisfy some condition are excluded from computation. In this paper we propose inclusive and anti-pruning. With inclusive pruning, necessary conditions that solutions must satisfy are identified and regions that can not be reached by su...