With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI—until now

Adding in a second neural network that guesses the identity of hidden pieces was key.

The short version

• Deep Blue took down Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, and poker bots have been beating professionals for years.
• But one classic game called Stratego held out.
• Even DeepMind, with its exceptional budget, couldn’t build a machine that reliably beat the best human players.

What happened

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.

Why it matters

And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.