Motivation

Minimax is an important concept in game theory and search.

Negamax is a variant which relies on $\max(a,b)=-\min(-a,-b)$

While this technique is applicable to Chess (as Deep Blue employed to defeat Kasparov, we choose Connect Four as our context since it has a simpler game mechanic.

While the core part of searches like Minimax may be easy to parallelize, critical aspects of alpha-beta pruning are more challenging.

Background