[scotty79]

> The MCTS search is itself a chain-of-thought.

I'm not quite sure it's a fair characterization.

Either way...

MCTS evaluates current position using predictions of future positions.

To understand value of ladders the algorithm would need iteratively analyse just the current layout of the pieces on the board.

Apparently the value of ladders is hard to infer from probabilisticrvsample of predictions of the future.

Ladders were accidental human discovery just because our attention is drawn to patterns. It just happens to be that they are valuable and can be mechanistically analyzed and evaluated. AI so far struggles with 1 shot outputting solutions that would require running small iterative program to calculate.