This seems like a less sophisticated variant* of the AlphaGo approach. In both cases, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is constrained by model for likely future moves. Here, they use a genetic algorithm. In AlphaGo, this is called the "policy network".
* This is not to say that these authors copied AlphaGo -- my uninformed guess is that this general approach of constraining MCTS has been known for a very long time.
* This is not to say that these authors copied AlphaGo -- my uninformed guess is that this general approach of constraining MCTS has been known for a very long time.