Good Decisions in Reasonable Time

Question 1

alpha-beta pruning

Answer 1

technique that prunes right-side siblings of a conclusive node
results in the optimal minimax value being returned as fruitless search will be prevented

Question 2

transposition table

Answer 2

a hash table (dictionary) whose keys are game-states, and values are minimax values

Question 3

evaluation function

Answer 3

estimates the expected utility of the game at a non-terminal state