I'm just learning the concepts and was interested in MCTS techniques. I can see in a simple game like tic-tac-toe how you would replace negamax say with MCTS.
It looks more complicated in card games. If you take a game like Whist or Bridge (ignoring bidding),
A deck of 52 cards is distributed to 4 players (though you play in teams of two). Following a lead card, you try to win the trick by placing a higher card (with some rules around following if you can and 'trumps').
I was trying to think of how you someone may implement this;
I can see that if you simulate this a player will know their 13 cards and the remaining 39 cards are unknown.
So, you could remove the 13 cards you know about from the deck and randomly assign those to the other players.
Then would you use MCTS to play out that one random selection and repeat the whole process with another initial random assignment of cards at the start?
The implementation would be monte-carlo simulations (the unknown 39 cards assigned amongst the 3 other players) where each simulation itself would play out via MCTS. I'm not sure if this is a sound technique? Or what techniques are used for similar games, existing solutions? I think maybe just taking the initial random allocation of cards and simulating playout using basic heuristics may be better?
