Everything about Move ordering
Prioritizing promising moves for speed
Move ordering refers to the practice of selecting the most promising moves first during game-tree search. In minimax searches with alpha–beta pruning, good move ordering is important, examining stronger moves early causes cutoffs that eliminate subtrees, vastly reducing the number of nodes searched. In the ideal case of perfect move ordering the search complexity drops from to approximately, effectively halving the effective branching factor to and allowing roughly twice the search depth for a given computational effort. Claude Shannon observed that although a typical chess position may have on the order of 30 legal moves, effective pruning and heuristics reduce the useful branching factor to only a few. Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: Move orderingA 5-minute orientation
- Pick up a classic book: A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the ... General Assembly of ...The most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: Computer chess move-ordering schemes using move influenceCited 8 times
- Go sideways: Alpha–beta pruningA closely related topic
- Go sideways: Principal variation searchA closely related topic
📖 Definitions
No dictionary entry for this exact phrase.
🗂️ The subject at a glance
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
Computer chess move-ordering schemes using move influence
Move ordering and communities in complex networks describing the game of go
Move Ordering by Time Ordering
A Pattern-Oriented Approach to Move Ordering: The Chessmaps Heuristic
The Guard Heuristic: Legal Move Ordering with Forward Game-Tree Pruning
Challenging state-of-the-art move ordering with Adaptive Data Structures
📚 Books worth reading
A Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the ... General Assembly of ...Florida Legislature . Senate, Florida · 1859
Nintendo 64Damian Butt · 1998
Blagger's GuideAndy McDermott · 1999
Nintendo 64Thomas Richter, Martian Wilmer · 1999
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
🔗 Related topics
- Alpha–beta pruning Alpha–beta pruning is a tree search algorithm that seeks to decrease the number of nodes that are evaluated by the minimax algorithm in its search tree…
- Principal variation search Principal variation search (sometimes equated with the practically identical NegaScout) is a negamax algorithm that can be faster than alpha–beta pruning…
- Glossary of computer chess terms The glossary of computer chess terms explains commonly used terms in computer chess, in alphabetical order. For terms used in chess in general, see Glossary…
- Expectiminimax The expectiminimax algorithm is a variation of the minimax algorithm, for use in artificial intelligence systems that play two-player zero-sum games, such…
- Killer heuristic In competitive two-player games, the killer heuristic is a move-ordering method based on the observation that a strong move or small set of such moves…
- Late move reductions Late Move Reductions (abbreviated as LMR) is a non-game specific enhancement to the alpha-beta algorithm and its other variants which attempts to examine…
- MTD(f) MTD(f) is an alpha-beta game tree search algorithm modified to use ‘zero-window’ initial search bounds, and memory (usually a transposition table) to reuse…
- SSS* SSS* is a search algorithm introduced by George Stockman in 1979. It conducts a state space search traversing a game tree in a best-first fashion similar…