[PeterisP]

The difference is that in chess or go, generating a search tree is trivial - predicting the world state after a couple turns of go or enumerating all the possible opponent moves in chess takes just a small bit of straightforward code encoding the (simple) rules of the game.

But how does an agent (not you) figure out a search tree of some nontrivial problem? How do you predict what the world state will be after taking some action if a programmer hasn't done that for you? Heck, even how do you predict what the world state might be after a second of doing absolutely nothing in a real-time environment? This is what this research is about.