The big difference is that search is problem specific and MILP solvers don’t know nearly as much about the domain. Minimax search is a fun case where the problem is recursive so at every level, the solution to the problem is trivial if you’ve solved the problem 1 layer down. This means that in Chess, you only need 1 search strategy and it will massively improve everything. In MILP, by contrast there isn’t a clean structure, so any search needs to find connected subsets with a given structure and any improvement will only be useful for a very small number of places.
3 Likes