An introduction to Monte Carlo Tree Search

We recently witnessed one of the biggest game AI events in history – Alpha Go became the first computer program to beat the world champion in a game of Go. The publication can be found here. Different techniques from machine learning and tree search have been combined by developers from DeepMind to achieve this result. One of them is the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm. This algorithm is fairly simple to understand and, interestingly, has applications outside of game AI.