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- Hacker News
- I think that what makes these games beatable repeatedly is that they're static. Not saying an algorithm properly trained won't play better than the average player a game like MtG, or my own https://aethersummon.com (specially now while it has under 90 possible scrolls only) but if you have a regular release cadence (say weekly or bi-weekly) of relevant new "cards", then I think the playing field is much more even for humans.
Those new additions can invalidate the whole training data by a single new "card" that changes completely the dynamics and would be easy for a player to understand and incorporate but not for an algorithm (perhaps with enough compute to re-train it regularly it could) - that along with the decision trees being orders of magnitude deeper, wider and with more conditionalities than go, chess or stratego - even through the same turn with the same cards available and same table state - would probably pose much harder problems for a compute bound algo.
by hnedeotes - This approach also works for Hanabi, which is a very interesting game. You can't see your own cards, but the other players can. I bought the game because someone on a reinforcement learning podcast [2] mentioned it, and actually played it multiple times.by smokel
- > Now, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford University has done it. Their AI, called Ataraxos, beat Pim Niemeijer, arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one, with four draws. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it.
Just 16 GPUs, and a few thousand dollars?
What about “researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford University” this wasn’t just anyone.
by rovr138 - This puts the earlier "Mastering the Game of Stratego with Model-Free Multiagent Reinforcement Learning", 2022 [1] in some perspective. Apparently the "mastering" in 2022 wasn't quite there yet. Four years later, the new approach seems to actually be better than humans.by smokel
- Oh no! Stratego had been on my mind as something we just hadn't tried hard enough to make a winning bot for, including the DeepMind effort from 2022. I was planning to make the first one.
I thought this was slightly less crank-coded than trying to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, but maybe these days you just ask Claude to do that and it tells you there's a counterexample at 1 + πi that no one ever noticed before.
by dmurray - I remember playing Stratego as a kid at a friends house, and eventually found out some of his pieces were subtly marked (chip in the pieces). Unhiding information was very unfair :)by erwincoumans
- > The algorithm also learned far faster—it played about 34 times fewer games than DeepNash, and still ended up much stronger.
Imo, this is the critical piece and what makes the AI work at all.
With hidden information games, the best move depends on information you don’t have. So a move could be good or bad, it just depends on something that’s impossible to know.
You’d like to search ahead, meaning “if I do this they will do that” but that’s impossible since you don’t even know what the opponent can do because you don’t know their hidden state.
If the possible hidden states are randomly distributed, you are screwed. It’s just like rock paper scissors: there’s no best move if your opponent is unpredictable.
However if you can quickly learn to predict their moves, it becomes possible to make informed decisions about what to do.
by janalsncm - I loved Stratego so much as a kid. But, I eventually couldn't find anyone to play with me because I crushed everyone, including my dad who was much better than me at chess. But, I never would have thought it'd be a game that models would have a hard time with. It feels relatively simple. And, inexplicably, I never even thought that there might be serious players...I've kept the board game, one of the very few things I have from young childhood, but it's been twenty years since I played. I guess it's time to find an online Stratego. Surely someone in the whole world can beat me.
Too bad I never played against an AI before they cracked it.
by SwellJoe