A preliminary investigation of the role of look-ahead in one-person games is presented. The use of look-ahead in comparing the effectiveness of different heuristic functions is discussed. There is a survey of recent work in tree-searching including that of Doran and Michie [4], Hart, Nilsson, and Raphael [7] and Pohl [17]–[19]. Based on some of Pohl's results, two theorems are proven in Section 2. These suggest a possible use for look-ahead. Some experimental results are presented in Section 3 which satisfy to a limited degree the aforementioned theorems, and some additional observations are made. In conclusion, an attempt is presented to relate look-ahead to the notion of “informedness” introduced by Hart, Nilsson, and Raphael. Finally, some further directions for research are suggested.