Editing Minimax (section)

=== Example ===
[[Image:Minimax.svg|thumb|400px|A minimax tree example]]
[[File:Plminmax.gif|thumb|400px|An animated pedagogical example that attempts to be human-friendly by substituting initial infinite (or arbitrarily large) values for emptiness and by avoiding using the [[negamax]] coding simplifications.]]

Suppose the game being played only has a maximum of two possible moves per player each turn. The algorithm generates the [[game tree|tree]] on the right, where the circles represent the moves of the player running the algorithm (''maximizing player''), and squares represent the moves of the opponent (''minimizing player''). Because of the limitation of computation resources, as explained above, the tree is limited to a ''look-ahead'' of 4&nbsp;moves.

The algorithm evaluates each ''[[leaf node]]'' using a heuristic evaluation function, obtaining the values shown. The moves where the ''maximizing player'' wins are assigned with positive infinity, while the moves that lead to a win of the ''minimizing player'' are assigned with negative infinity. At level&nbsp;3, the algorithm will choose, for each node, the '''smallest''' of the ''[[child node]]'' values, and assign it to that same node (e.g. the node on the left will choose the minimum between "10" and "+∞", therefore assigning the value "10" to itself). The next step, in level&nbsp;2, consists of choosing for each node the '''largest''' of the ''child node'' values. Once again, the values are assigned to each ''[[parent node]]''. The algorithm continues evaluating the maximum and minimum values of the child nodes alternately until it reaches the ''[[root node]]'', where it chooses the move with the largest value (represented in the figure with a blue arrow). This is the move that the player should make in order to ''minimize'' the ''maximum'' possible [[loss function|loss]].