Not 2023, and not from the AI thing. It comes from RPGs, like what the sibling comment explained. It must be as old as D&D.

While it may have existed for a long time, it's gotten significantly more use in recent days in a non-RPG settings. Quick illustration from HN comment section[1]:

- From 2010 to 2019: 40 occurrences in HN's comments

- Compare that to over 70 for just the past two years.

Basically, it's as if you said “Woke” wasn't a contemporary word, because it used to exist in a niche for a long time.

[1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

FWIW, while I don't know the origin of this term, I learned it first as a noun, used in the context of AI - the old-fashioned AI, as applied to game development, some 15 years ago. The verb form, however, is something I've only noticed people using in the last few months; it's possible this is due to some recent events that made the term more widely known / popular.

I have never seen min-max used as a noun and I'm not really sure what it'd even mean as a noun, but I've been using it as a verb for several decades.

It's an old-school algorithm family for determining optimal play in turn-based PvP games.