Trying to learn MCST using YouTube videos and papers like this one.
http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Silver/web/Applications_files/grand-challenge.pdf
However I am not having much of a luck understanding the details beyond the high level theoretical explanations. Here are some quotes from the paper above and questions I have.
Selection Phase: MCTS iteratively selects the highest scoring child node of the current state. If the current state is the root node, where did these children come from in the first place? Wouldn't you have a tree with just a single root node to begin with? With just a single root node, do you get into Expansion and Simulation phase right away?
If MCTS selects the highest scoring child node in Selection phase, you never explore other children or possibly even a brand new child whilst going down the levels of the tree?
How does the Expansion phase happen for a node? In the diagram above, why did it not choose leaf node but decided to add a sibling to the leaf node?
During the Simulation phase, stochastic policy is used to select legal moves for both players until the game terminates. Is this stochastic policy a hard-coded behavior and you are basically rolling a dice in the simulation to choose one of the possible moves taking turns between each player until the end?
The way I understand this is you start at a single root node and by repeating the above phases you construct the tree to a certain depth. Then you choose the child with the best score at the second level as your next move. The size of the tree you are willing to construct is basically your hard AI responsiveness requirement right? Since while the tree is being constructed the game will stall and compute this tree.