this is new to me but.. a quick read of Wikipedia [1] later, it appears that this decades-old method takes a goal, and then uses branching and recording to find paths that differ the least from the goal. The article mentions that in practice, the curse of dimensionality is so bad here that approximations are often used in practice. Does that capture it?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_dynamic_programming