uct

UCT is an acronym that can refer to several institutions and concepts, depending on context. The two most common references are the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the Upper Confidence bounds applied to Trees, a computer science algorithm used in Monte Carlo Tree Search.

University of Cape Town (UCT) is a public research university located in Cape Town, South Africa. It traces its origins to 1829, when the South African College was established on the site; it adopted the University of Cape Town name in 1918. UCT is widely regarded as one of Africa’s leading universities, with multiple faculties, a strong emphasis on research, and campuses in the city and surrounding areas. It offers undergraduate and postgraduate programs across the sciences, humanities, and professional disciplines, and it hosts a number of research institutes and centers.

Upper Confidence bounds applied to Trees (UCT) is a selection strategy used in Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). It selects which node to explore next by balancing the estimated value of a node with a probability of exploration, using a form of the UCB1 criterion. The method was introduced by Levente Kocsis and Csaba Szepesvári in 2006 and has since become a standard component of many MCTS-based systems. UCT enables efficient search in large decision trees, contributing to advances in game AI and other sequential decision problems. In practice, UCT is often combined with simulations and backpropagation to iteratively improve the decision policy.

Because UCT is an acronym used by multiple organizations and concepts, the intended meaning is usually clarified by context.