Predicting The Performance of Minimax and Product in Game-Tree
  The discovery that the minimax decision rule performs poorly in some games
has sparked interest in possible alternatives to minimax. Until recently, the
only games in which minimax was known to perform poorly were games which were
mainly of theoretical interest. However, this paper reports results showing
poor performance of minimax in a more common game called kalah. For the kalah
games tested, a non-minimax decision rule called the product rule performs
significantly better than minimax.
  This paper also discusses a possible way to predict whether or not minimax
will perform well in a game when compared to product. A parameter called the
rate of heuristic flaw (rhf) has been found to correlate positively with the.
performance of product against minimax. Both analytical and experimental
results are given that appear to support the predictive power of rhf.
