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Nope, brute force means exhaustive search by definition. One could arguably claim that something like minmax is brute force, since you only prune subtrees that
by nandemo 11y ago
Nope, brute force means exhaustive search by definition.
One could arguably claim that something like minmax is brute force, since you only prune subtrees that are provably sub-optimal.
But a search algorithm or heuristic that prunes over 99.99999999% (there are more 9s, but I won't bother calculating the right number) of the search space is not brute force.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- argonaut 11y agoBy this logic, chess engines are not brute force. Anyone familiar with the state of chess engines would find this ridiculous. I would agree that under one extremely nitpicky definition of brute force, brute force means searching every state. But chess engines are widely considered to be brute force. They don't have neural nets or fancy nonlinear function approximators for board state evaluation. But they most certainly don't search every single position. Their search depth is capped.
- gcp 11y agoThey don't have neural nets or fancy nonlinear function approximators for board state evaluation Nonlinear function approximations are pretty common due to combining several evaluation heuristics and indexing in to tables with weights with the output of previous heuristics. As for neural networks - the extra nonlinear layers seem to have too much computational overhead compared to the increase in evaluation accuracy. Chess board state can be reasonably approximated with linear terms and few cherry-picked higher order terms.
- argonaut 11y agoI'll grant you that they use nonlinear functions, but in my defense I did specify "fancy nonlinear..."
- nandemo 11y agoAre we in the same thread? I conceded that things like minmax can also be considered brute force. I also gave a (very liberal) estimate of how much the tree is pruned. Why still call it "extremely nitpicky"?