MTD(f) was introduced in 1994 and largely supplanted NegaScout (PVS), the previously dominant search paradigm for chess, checkers, othello and other game automatons.
[citation needed] MTD(f) was first described in a University of Alberta Technical Report authored by Aske Plaat, Jonathan Schaeffer, Wim Pijls, and Arie de Bruin,[2] which would later receive the ICCA Novag Best Computer Chess Publication award for 1994/1995.
MTD(f) derives its efficiency by only performing zero-window alpha-beta searches, with a previously determined "good" bound (i.e. beta).
[4] AlphaBetaWithMemory is a variation of Alpha Beta Search that caches previous results.
However, wider search windows are more forgiving for engines with large odd/even swings and fine-grained evaluation functions.