I was inspired by this and created a version with customizable ball count, accessible code... and a speed slider, to satisfy the less patient among us.
I'm very impressed, this made my day (my month ?). Too bad your site lacks some nice video demos on the front page.
To other HN readers, look what I found in it's tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkvB4nb8PXw
I agree, this article is well explained but it's not MCTS.
To be more accurate, this is Monte Carlo, and here it is applied to search the tree of game turn possibilities and doing stats on it. But Monte-Carlo Tree Search is a "reserved" name of a specific algorithm, involving more than what is done in the article : some kind of caching, and some optimisations.
In fact, it would be a great addition to this article to do a part 2, and explaining how to extend the code to do MCTS.
I imagine this two way trip would be a better MCTS presentation than the classic ones describing the algorithm step by step in one shot.
I stumbled upon this old post from Iñigo Quilez, and this made my day. Especially because I did not know about the Babylonian multiplication, let alone its proof. The absence of explanation in the post made it into a nice puzzle, I had to figure things out by myself. Maths teaching should more often be like this kickstarted discovery...
https://explorers.toxicode.fr/?remoteWorkspace=pong-war