Alpha-beta pruning is a search algorithm used to reduce the number of nodes in the minimax search tree. It is often used to prune meaningless branches in the search tree to increase the calculation speed.

This adversarial search algorithm is mainly used in two-player games on machines. When the algorithm evaluates that the subsequent moves of a certain strategy are worse than the previous ones, it will stop calculating.

This algorithm reaches the same conclusion as the minimax algorithm, but prunes branches that do not affect the final decision, thereby improving efficiency and reducing the amount of computation.