Branching factor alone doesn't tell you much. The important thing is how many branches are meaningful. Consider the board game Arimaa, which has an enormous bra

Branching factor alone doesn't tell you much. The important thing is how many branches are meaningful. Consider the board game Arimaa, which has an enormous branching factor[0]. It was designed to be difficult for computers, but in 2015, David Wu's "Sharp" software beat some of the best humans players[1]. This didn't need any revolutionary new AI techniques, only some clever human-written heuristics used in combination with classical computer chess techniques to prune the game tree. There are many possible moves each turn, but most can be discarded as obviously bad. The same could be true of Pokemon. [0] http://arimaa.com/arimaa/ http://arimaa.com/arimaa/ [1] http://icosahedral.net/downloads/djwu2015arimaa_color.pdf http://icosahedral.net/downloads/djwu2015arimaa_color.pdf