With most information hidden, the game Stratego
Ars Technica Jacek Krywko
AI finally cracked Stratego, beating a top human 15-1 with four draws. It did it with just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars, not a giant lab budget.
Based on reporting by Ars Technica, Jacek Krywko — read the original for the full story.
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Chess fell in 1997. Go went down in 2016. Poker bots have been handling professionals for years. But Stratego, the board game built around hidden armies and long stretches of uncertainty, kept beating back machine players. Even DeepMind, despite its deep pockets, couldn’t make a system that could consistently beat the best humans.
Now that wall has cracked. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford built an AI called Ataraxos, and it took on Pim Niemeijer, widely seen as the strongest Stratego player ever. The result was lopsided: 15 wins, one loss, and four draws for the machine.
The odd part is how little hardware it took. The team trained Ataraxos on 16 GPUs and spent only a few thousand dollars. That matters because Stratego is not a tidy game of perfect information. Each side starts with 40 pieces, ranging from a marshal to a spy, along with bombs and a flag. You only learn what a piece really is when it runs into another one in battle, and that hidden information stretches across a long game.
That makes Stratego closer to poker than chess, even if the board looks more like a war room than a card table. Eugene Vinitsky, an NYU researcher and co-author of the study, said that the game’s defining feature is the sheer amount of information that stays concealed for a very long time. Humans have lived with that uncertainty forever. Now an AI has learned to swim in it better than the best player around.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The quiet part here is that brute force wasn’t the story. Small, focused training beat prestige and budget, which is the sort of result that should make big AI labs uncomfortable. Stratego was one of those “surely this one is safe” games, and that list keeps shrinking, which is bad news for anyone still selling mystery as a moat.
Read more about this at: Ars Technica
