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Decision rule used for minimizing the possible loss for a worst case scenario
the decision theory concept
Minmax (sometimes Minimax, MM or saddle point) is a decision rule used in artificial intelligence, decision theory, game theory, statistics, and philosophy for minimizing the possible loss for a worst case (maximum loss) scenario. When dealing with gains, it is referred to as "maximin" – to maximize the minimum gain. Originally formulated for several player zero sum game theory, covering both the cases where players take alternate moves and those where they make simultaneous moves, it has also been extended to more complex games and to general decision making in the presence of uncertainty.

Frequently, in game theory, maximin is distinct from minimax. Minimax is used in zero sum games to denote minimizing the opponent's maximum payoff. In a zero sum game, this is identical to minimizing one's own maximum loss, and to maximizing one's own minimum gain. "Maximin" is a term commonly used for non zero sum games to describe the strategy which maximizes one's own minimum payoff. In non zero sum games, this is not generally the same as minimizing the opponent's maximum gain, nor the same as the Nash equilibrium strategy.

The minimax values are very important in the theory of repeated games. One of the central theorems in this theory, the folk theorem, relies on the minimax values.

In combinatorial game theory, there is a minimax algorithm for game solutions. A simple version of the minimax algorithm, stated below, deals with games such as tic tac toe, where each player can win, lose, or draw. If player A can win in one move, their best move is that winning move. If player B knows that one move will lead to the situation where player A can win in one move, while another move will lead to the situation where player A can, at best, draw, then player B's best move is the one leading to a draw. Late in the game, it's easy to see what the "best" move is. The minimax algorithm helps find the best move, by working backwards from the end of the game. At each step it assumes that player A is trying to maximize the chances of A winning, while on the next turn player B is trying to minimize the chances of A winning (i. e., to maximize B's own chances of winning).

A minimax algorithm is a recursive algorithm for choosing the next move in an n player game, usually a two player game. A value is associated with each position or state of the game. This value is computed by means of a position evaluation function and it indicates how good it would be for a player to reach that position. The player then makes the move that maximizes the minimum value of the position resulting from the opponent's possible following moves. If it is A's turn to move, A gives a value to each of their legal moves. A possible allocation method consists in assigning a certain win for A as +1 and for B as −1. This leads to combinatorial game theory as developed by John H. Conway. An alternative is using a rule that if the result of a move is an immediate win for A, it is assigned positive infinity and if it is an immediate win for B, negative infinity. The value to A of any other move is the maximum of the values resulting from each of B's possible replies. For this reason, A is called the maximizing player and B is called the minimizing player, hence the name minimax algorithm. The above algorithm will assign a value of positive or negative infinity to any position since the value of every position will be the value of some final winning or losing position. Often this is generally only possible at the very end of complicated games such as chess or go, since it is not computationally feasible to look ahead as far as the completion of the game, except towards the end, and instead, positions are given finite values as estimates of the degree of belief that they will lead to a win for one player or another. This can be extended if we can supply a heuristic evaluation function which gives values to non final game states without considering all possible following complete sequences. We can then limit the minimax algorithm to look only at a certain number of moves ahead. This number is called the "look ahead", measured in "plies". For example, the chess computer Deep Blue (the first one to beat a reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov at that time) looked ahead at least 12 plies, then applied a heuristic evaluation function. The algorithm can be thought of as exploring the nodes of a game tree. The effective branching factor of the tree is the average number of children of each node (i. e., the average number of legal moves in a position). The number of nodes to be explored usually increases exponentially with the number of plies (it is less than exponential if evaluating forced moves or repeated positions). The number of nodes to be explored for the analysis of a game is therefore approximately the branching factor raised to the power of the number of plies. It is therefore impractical to completely analyze games such as chess using the minimax algorithm. The performance of the naïve minimax algorithm may be improved dramatically, without affecting the result, by the use of alpha–beta pruning. Other heuristic pruning methods can also be used, but not all of them are guaranteed to give the same result as the unpruned search. A naïve minimax algorithm may be trivially modified to additionally return an entire Principal Variation along with a minimax score.

Suppose the game being played only has a maximum of two possible moves per player each turn. The algorithm generates the tree on the right, where the circles represent the moves of the player running the algorithm (maximizing player), and squares represent the moves of the opponent (minimizing player). Because of the limitation of computation resources, as explained above, the tree is limited to a look ahead of 4 moves. The algorithm evaluates each leaf node using a heuristic evaluation function, obtaining the values shown. The moves where the maximizing player wins are assigned with positive infinity, while the moves that lead to a win of the minimizing player are assigned with negative infinity. At level 3, the algorithm will choose, for each node, the smallest of the child node values, and assign it to that same node (e. g. the node on the left will choose the minimum between "10" and "+∞", therefore assigning the value "10" to itself). The next step, in level 2, consists of choosing for each node the largest of the child node values. Once again, the values are assigned to each parent node. The algorithm continues evaluating the maximum and minimum values of the child nodes alternately until it reaches the root node, where it chooses the move with the largest value (represented in the figure with a blue arrow). This is the move that the player should make in order to minimize the maximum possible loss.

Minimax theory has been extended to decisions where there is no other player, but where the consequences of decisions depend on unknown facts. For example, deciding to prospect for minerals entails a cost, which will be wasted if the minerals are not present, but will bring major rewards if they are. One approach is to treat this as a game against nature (see move by nature), and using a similar mindset as Murphy's law or resistentialism, take an approach which minimizes the maximum expected loss, using the same techniques as in the two person zero sum games. In addition, expectiminimax trees have been developed, for two player games in which chance (for example, dice) is a factor.

A key feature of minimax decision making is being non probabilistic: in contrast to decisions using expected value or expected utility, it makes no assumptions about the probabilities of various outcomes, just scenario analysis of what the possible outcomes are. It is thus robust to changes in the assumptions, in contrast to these other decision techniques. Various extensions of this non probabilistic approach exist, notably minimax regret and Info gap decision theory. Further, minimax only requires ordinal measurement (that outcomes be compared and ranked), not interval measurements (that outcomes include "how much better or worse"), and returns ordinal data, using only the modeled outcomes: the conclusion of a minimax analysis is: "this strategy is minimax, as the worst case is (outcome), which is less bad than any other strategy". Compare to expected value analysis, whose conclusion is of the form: "This strategy yields Minimax thus can be used on ordinal data, and can be more transparent.

The concept of "lesser evil" voting (LEV) can be seen as a form of the minimax strategy where voters, when faced with two or more candidates, choose the one they perceive as the least harmful or the "lesser evil." To do so, "voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites," but rather as an opportunity to reduce harm or loss.

In philosophy, the term "maximin" is often used in the context of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, where he refers to it in the context of The Difference Principle. Rawls defined this principle as the rule which states that social and economic inequalities should be arranged so that "they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged members of society".