Spending Thinking Time Wisely: Accelerating MCTS with Virtual Expansions

Understand

One of the most important AI research questions is to trade off computation versus performance since ``perfect rationality" exists in theory but is impossible to achieve in practice.

• Recently, Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) has attracted considerable attention due to the significant performance improvement in various challenging domains.
• However, the expensive time cost during search severely restricts its scope for applications.
• This paper proposes the Virtual MCTS (V-MCTS), a variant of MCTS that spends more search time on harder states and less search time on simpler states adaptively.