2215	 Application of Game Tree Searching Techniques to Sequential Pattern Recognition	 A sequential pattern recognition SPR procedure does not test all the features of a pattern at once. Instead it selects a feature to be tested. After receiving the result of that test the procedure either classifies the unknown pattern or selects another feature to be tested etc. Medical diagnosis is an example of SPR. In this paper the authors suggest that SPR be viewed as a one-person game played against nature chance . Virtually all the powerful techniques developed for searching two-person strictly competitive game trees can easily be incorporated either directly or by analogy into SPR procedures. In particular one can incorporate the mini average backing-up procedure and the gamma procedure which are the analogues of the minimax backing-up procedure and the alpha-beta procedure respectively. Some computer simulated experiments in character recognition are presented. The results indicate that the approach is promising. sequential pattern recognition game tree searching game against nature gamma procedure mini average backing-up procedure dynamic programming branch-and-bound approach optimal solution
