[nl]

I guess I've never thought of search as being either connectionist or non-connectionist. It's self-evident that people search (eg look up in books) things that aren't in local memory.

I think the distinction is how the looked-up knowledge is integrated.

[jens-c]

The non-connectionist, classical, symbolical aspect is not so much "search" per se, but the fact that MCTS performs a form of look-ahead, which requires manually encoding the rules of the game in some fashion.

Determining what the legal moves in a state are, and what state results from a given move, is not something the AI would learn by itself, but is programmed into the system by a human expert.

[Vetch]

I do not believe this is still true in MuZero, where no rules are ever explicitly encoded, beyond what leaks in from the reward function?

[jens-c]

Indeed, in this latest iteration the network learns a model of the game by itself. Note however that it still uses MCTS and performs a look-ahead, i.e. it is still being "told" by the programmers how to do search (planning), only now it is left to the system to determine how it wants to represent states/actions/policies internally.