Chess Tree Search

Tree search is one of the central algorithms of any game playing program :

The therm is based on looking at all possible game positions as a tree, with the legal game moves forming the branches of this tree. The leaves of the tree are all final positions, where the outcome of the game is know. The problem for most interesting games is that the size of this tree is tremendously huge. Searching the whole tree is impossible. All practical search algorithms are approximations of doing such a full tree search.