Evaluation of the Use of Minimax Search in Connect-4</br>—How Does the Minimax Search Algorithm Perform in Connect-4 with Increasing Grid Sizes?

Abstract

As computers have become faster at performing computations over the decades, algorithms to play games have also become more efficient. This research paper seeks to see how the performance of the Minimax search evolves on increasing Connect-4 grid sizes. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Minimax search algorithm in making optimal moves under different circumstances and to understand how well the algorithm scales. To answer this question we tested and analyzed the algorithm several times on different grid sizes with a time limit to see its performance as the complexity increases, we also looked for the average search depth for each grid size. The obtained results show that despite larger grid sizes, the Minimax search algorithm stays relatively consistent in terms of performance.