Your seond assignment is a game experiment. You do not have to do any programming, but you will need to collect data while playing the Taxman game. You may use one lab partner, but if you do you must tell me who you worked with and how the work was divided. You each need to do your own write-up.
The Taxman game is located as a windows zip file on Canvas and on-line on the GAME Lab web site http://gamelab.cis.umd.umich.edu/ai-demos/Taxman/taxmanWeb/
In Taxman you have the ability to set the depth of the search during mini-max and you can turn alpha-beta pruning on or off. You can also set the number coins used and which player (human or AI) goes first. The measures collected and displayed by the game software include: two player scores, total number of moves tried, number of alpha cutoffs, number of beta cutoffs, AI advantage, and search time for the AI player.
Your task is to figure out the impact of alpha-beta pruning relative to minimax without alpha-beta pruning for selected search depths. You need to try at least 3 different numbers of ply searched with and without alpha-beta pruning.
The write-up for this project is due next week (5/22/20). Your write-up for this project should include 5 non-trivial sections: introduction, procedure, results (graphs and tables expected), discussion, and conclusions. The discussion of your results should include things that went right, things that went wrong, and the conclusions should focus on lessons learned.
Assigned: 5-13-20
Date due: 5-22-20