If you really need maximum performance then you probably don't want to deal with JS objects at all. (But you should benchmark it first... you might be surprised how far V8 gets you with JIT optimizations - although serialization will be a bottleneck whether you're using JSON or deepClone.) For example, as one potential alternative, you could invent a scheme for encoding the state in a bit array, and then find clever bitwise operations for inspecting or manipulating it.
For inspiration, many chess engines store game state in a "bitboard" [0] which is a 64 bit representation of some (partial) state of the board.
Of course, at this point you might not even want to be using JavaScript... maybe you could write the hot path in Rust, compile it to wasm, and then use JS for orchestration/UI.
That is really useful, thank you! I think first stage is building the game and see if the whole Genetic Algorithm/Monte Carlo Setup actually works, even if the first few iterations take weeks.
The issue is I want to figure out if there are combos that I don't even know exist that are unusually strong. Basically make sure I balance the card pool but automatically.
For inspiration, many chess engines store game state in a "bitboard" [0] which is a 64 bit representation of some (partial) state of the board.
Of course, at this point you might not even want to be using JavaScript... maybe you could write the hot path in Rust, compile it to wasm, and then use JS for orchestration/UI.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitboard#Chess_bitboards