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Originally MCTS did have randomness, yes. I think the article mentions it, but this came in in the form of playouts at the end, used just to evaluate positions.
by kadoban 3y ago
Originally MCTS did have randomness, yes. I think the article mentions it, but this came in in the form of playouts at the end, used just to evaluate positions. This has been replaced in current similar projects by NN evaluations, which are higher quality (as you can probably imagine, just playing random moves to see who wins is not very good, it was just the best strategy known at the time).
So the monte-carlo turned out to be an unessential (and suboptimal) part of what is now still called MCTS, making the name a bit unfortunate.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoIn essence the NN evaluations are acting as a PRNG with values heavily biased by an established heuristic. So while it's very much a specialization of MCTS and probably should go by a different name, one could argue it's still using monte carlo methods.
- pavlov 3y agoSounds like the dice are loaded in Monte Carlo.
- mzl 3y agoSmall side note, standard MCTS is often implemented with heuristic guiding the moves in the playouts and not just random moves, as that gives more interesting information.