Aside from the tree search perspective, MCTS can be thought of as an extension of upper confidence bound approaches for multi armed bandit problems. This stuff

Aside from the tree search perspective, MCTS can be thought of as an extension of upper confidence bound approaches for multi armed bandit problems. This stuff is all about exploration vs exploitation tradeoffs - which is something quite different to Minimax / alpha-beta search - those prune branches when they logically prove that evaluating the branches cannot improve the decision of which move to make. A multi armed bandit problem offers you one decision to pull one of n levers, so it's like a wide shallow game tree where the root has n leaves.