> that we mitigate with smarter search

aka "a heuristic"

See my other comments about static profiling of kernels. There are ways of improving the search that keep runtime at the heart of it.

mcts / rl isn't really a heuristic. but yes heuristics can be used temporarily to keep the search space small, and removed over time as the search algorithm improves.

Exactly, I was going to ask about this bit…