Most contemporary implementations of Monte Carlo tree search are based on some variant of UCT

The main difficulty in selecting child nodes is maintaining some balance between the exploitation of deep variants after moves with high average win rate and the exploration of moves with few simulations.

An illustration of alpha–beta pruning. The grayed-out subtrees don't need to be explored (when moves are evaluated from left to right), since it is known that the group of subtrees as a whole yields the value of an equivalent subtree or worse, and as such cannot influence the final result. The max and min levels represent the turn of the player and the adversary, respectively.

For example, the chess computer Deep Blue (the first one to beat a reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov at that time) looked ahead at least 12 plies, then applied a heuristic evaluation function.[6]