1. AI breakthrough in Stratego – superhuman play with far less data
- “The new bot required two orders of magnitude less training data and plays better.” – PaulHoule
- “Four years later, the new approach seems to actually be better than humans.” – smokel
- “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.” – rovr138
2. Challenges for AI in imperfect‑information, evolving games (metagame, hidden info)
- “Those new additions can invalidate the whole training data by a single new 'card' that changes completely the dynamics …” – hnedesotes
- “There is - metagame. There is no universal optimal strategy in a trading card game, because what is optimal depends on what decks and strategies other people are playing.” – wavemode
- “If you add draft into the mix it gets worse for the AI … a good play in most situations can easily be a bad play under others.” – hnedesotes
3. Human psychological and nostalgic aspects of Stratego (bluff, memory, personal skill)
- “I recall playing this game as a preschooler. It was mostly psychology and bluff.” – gritzko
- “Yes back then the game was hard partly because you couldn't remember all of your opponents pieces that you had seen. An AI would never forget though.” – changoplatanero
- “I loved Stratego so much as a kid… I never would have thought it'd be a game that models would have a hard time with.” – SwellJoe
- “I, too, remember figuring out a strategy when I was around 11, and never lost a game after that.” – WalterBright