Sorry, that's just egregious abuse of terminology. Either you're pruning the branches of a tree (or other graph, potentially) when you're doing a tree search, or you don't do pruning. Specifically advice taking (if that's what you mean) is not pruning.

It's a direct quotation from your comment, not a "scare quote". How does "implicit search" do pruning? Can you explain?

Edit: Turns out "implicit search" is actually a thing in the literature, albeit introduced in a single paper I could find that claims Diffusion Modelling does it:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19805

I don't think anyone has picked that term up. One more for the scrapheap then, oh well, next paper.

No mention of pruning though. So what did you, or the other guys mean?