8 ms·

It's interesting to watch the videos they link of deepmind playing against the top-level Stratego masters [0]. I usually find Stratego to be a bit of a dull gam

It's interesting to watch the videos they link of deepmind playing against the top-level Stratego masters [0]. I usually find Stratego to be a bit of a dull game (less elegant and more drawn out than Go and chess), but I'm a sucker for watching top-level AIs play. Its skills for bluffing are both fascinating and a bit scary. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaUdWoSMjSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaUdWoSMjSY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-9ZXmyNKgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-9ZXmyNKgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOalLpAfDSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOalLpAfDSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhNoYl_g8mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhNoYl_g8mo

ep103 4y ago
Are these games against stratego masters? I'm watching the first one, but it doesn't say who they're playing against
- clolege 4y ago
  yep, top anonymized players
- sdwr 4y ago
  Dont think the player pool is very deep, doubt there are many masters around..
  - topaz0 4y ago
    What makes you think that? The article says that one of the coauthors used to be a world champion, which suggests to me that there is some kind of competitive organized league.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      How many people study Stratego as much as an International Master studies chess?
      - throwthudec1 4y ago
        I think there are probably very much diminishing returns. A small scene is probably pretty damn good at the top. Having hundreds of thousands of competitive players helps, but even with a small sample you are probably likely to get at least some very, very strong players. It's hard to think of a relevant real world example, but a fun corollary I'm familiar with is Fedex (Federico Perez Ponsa). He is a full chess Grandmaster, #461 in the world in chess amongst ~300k active FIDE players. By your "International Masters study hard" logic, when you drop him into Age of Empires 2, a game with ~500 competitive tournament players, his work ethic should dominate. But it turns out that the top ~100 AoE2 players are really damn good and practice a ton (easily chess IM amounts), and Fedex tops out around ~#50 in the world. https://ratings.fide.com/profile/117927 https://ratings.fide.com/profile/117927 https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Fedex https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Fedex
        sdwr 4y ago
        Love the real life example. No matter how good the top players are relative to the competition tho, I feel like a large playerbase still raises the skill bar to a huge degree. There's a ratchet effect where someone figures something out, other people copy, and it breaks into public consciousness through influencers and popularizers. Then on the tail end, regular people regurgitate it for years like it's new information. (Getting sick of hearing about cognitive biases and product-market fit and dunning kruger, ffs). I've seen it with dota over the last 10 years. Pro players were always good, but now bad players are good and pro players are better. Not to mention the motivation that comes from seeing other people work hard. When it comes to stratego, watching the linked games (from an armchair!), the human players looked relatively sloppy. Overusing scouts in the early game, too eager to trade, noticed a piece being forgotten about once. Not to say I'd be better, but it definitely looks like the scene is "for fun" and not so serious.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        ep103 4y ago
- scoofy 4y ago
  The player in the first game had an advantage and didn't trade 10's, then for some crazy reason left his 10 out there to the only piece approaching the 10. I played a ton of stratego as a young adult, and i would never have thought that was close to an optimal strategy.
sdwr 4y ago
Watched some of the first game. I'd bet stratego favors defence, advantage to the AI that has no/minimal concept of the value of time.
- clolege 4y ago
  Yeah this is one of the reasons why I find it more dull than chess. There is an incentive to just not move your pieces, so that the other player thinks they're bombs. As a result, players only activate 2-3 pieces at a time. In chess, on the other hand, you are constantly moving your pawns to the other side to promotion, or otherwise trying to activate/coordinate all of your pieces for an attack. It makes me think that if deepmind for Stratego was trained to not lose instead of win, then the top strategy might be shuffling pieces and letting the enemy come to attack. No human would ever have the patience to play that way though.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmontra 4y ago
    Chess has the 50 moves rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty-move_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty-move_rule about A "player can claim a draw if no capture has been made and no pawn has been moved in the last fifty moves"
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    > It makes me think that if deepmind for Stratego was trained to not lose instead of win, then the top strategy might be shuffling pieces and letting the enemy come to attack. No human would ever have the patience to play that way though. Tournament Stratego uses a clock, which reduces some of the issue there. It's not hard to beat a player that does what you suggest; just send some middling pieces after each piece that moves. You'll take the weak pieces and reveal the strong pieces. It is much more defensive than chess in general though, as moving a piece and capturing with a piece both give the other player information.
    - 4y ago
VHRanger 4y ago
FWIW one of the big things poker AI taught humans is massive overbets (eg. going all in for $200 over a $15 pot). This is scary to do well in practice, because the mathematically optimal bluff frequency approaches 50% as you increase the overbet size.
- clolege 4y ago
  Wow, that's crazy. It seems like it would be easier for AI to do, since it doesn't have any tells (it's easier to have a poker face when you don't have a face at all). I remember playing poker as a kid, and experimenting with pretending like my cards were good/bad with body language. I don't think that any professional players use that approach (they just have sunglasses and a straight face), but I wonder if AI could beat humans even more consistently if it developed a way to convey tells and fake tells?
  - VHRanger 4y ago
    All Poker AIs developped as yet approaches Nash Equilibrium -- it's just a "perfect" strategy that wins by default because it makes no mistakes. Since you make mistakes against the AI strategy, and the sum of the game of poker is 0, you lose by default. No poker bots yet I know of have developed "exploitative" strategies, where they deviate from the Nash Equilibrium strategy to exploit opponent mistakes. Back when I played professionally (2012-2016, poker AIs being relevant in 2015/16) the standard was to use a bot to study the best default strategies and use expert human judgement to deviate from it against bad opponents.
    - clolege 4y ago
      Nash equilibriums exist when bluffing is involved? It seems like it would introduce a level of predictability that would make it easier to know when the opponent is bluffing.
      - aetherane 4y ago
        A strategy can involve probability, like bluff 30% of time.
throwup 4y ago
Fascinating games. But I played a lot of Stratego as a kid, and I remember 1 was the strongest piece and 9 was the weakest. In these videos it seems 10 is strongest and 2 is weakest and that's making it confusing to watch. Did the pieces change sometime in the past 40 years or am I imagining things?
- alan-crowe 4y ago
  I've just watched a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQbGHgaWbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQbGHgaWbM that talks about "original" Stratego, a game created in 1947 by Jacques Johan Mogendorff. It might be nostalgic for you. Searching to find out whether "original" is the current version, I've noticed that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratego#Versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratego#Versions answers your question "European versions of the game give the Marshal the highest number (10), while the initial American versions give the Marshal the lowest number (1) to show the highest value (i.e. it is the #1 or most powerful tile). More recent American versions of the game, which adopted the European system, caused considerable complaint among American players who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s."
  - NoddingPudding 4y ago
    I just checked my UK eighties version and the Marshal is 1 on the board
  - throwup 4y ago
    I guess that makes me one of those complaining Americans. If I ever get back into the game, I'll have to get used to the new numbers.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

ep103 4y ago

Are these games against stratego masters? I'm watching the first one, but it doesn't say who they're playing against

clolege 4y ago
yep, top anonymized players
sdwr 4y ago
Dont think the player pool is very deep, doubt there are many masters around..
- topaz0 4y ago
  What makes you think that? The article says that one of the coauthors used to be a world champion, which suggests to me that there is some kind of competitive organized league.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    How many people study Stratego as much as an International Master studies chess?
    - throwthudec1 4y ago
      I think there are probably very much diminishing returns. A small scene is probably pretty damn good at the top. Having hundreds of thousands of competitive players helps, but even with a small sample you are probably likely to get at least some very, very strong players. It's hard to think of a relevant real world example, but a fun corollary I'm familiar with is Fedex (Federico Perez Ponsa). He is a full chess Grandmaster, #461 in the world in chess amongst ~300k active FIDE players. By your "International Masters study hard" logic, when you drop him into Age of Empires 2, a game with ~500 competitive tournament players, his work ethic should dominate. But it turns out that the top ~100 AoE2 players are really damn good and practice a ton (easily chess IM amounts), and Fedex tops out around ~#50 in the world. https://ratings.fide.com/profile/117927 https://ratings.fide.com/profile/117927 https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Fedex https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Fedex
      - sdwr 4y ago
        Love the real life example. No matter how good the top players are relative to the competition tho, I feel like a large playerbase still raises the skill bar to a huge degree. There's a ratchet effect where someone figures something out, other people copy, and it breaks into public consciousness through influencers and popularizers. Then on the tail end, regular people regurgitate it for years like it's new information. (Getting sick of hearing about cognitive biases and product-market fit and dunning kruger, ffs). I've seen it with dota over the last 10 years. Pro players were always good, but now bad players are good and pro players are better. Not to mention the motivation that comes from seeing other people work hard. When it comes to stratego, watching the linked games (from an armchair!), the human players looked relatively sloppy. Overusing scouts in the early game, too eager to trade, noticed a piece being forgotten about once. Not to say I'd be better, but it definitely looks like the scene is "for fun" and not so serious.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        ep103 4y ago
scoofy 4y ago
The player in the first game had an advantage and didn't trade 10's, then for some crazy reason left his 10 out there to the only piece approaching the 10. I played a ton of stratego as a young adult, and i would never have thought that was close to an optimal strategy.

sdwr 4y ago

Watched some of the first game. I'd bet stratego favors defence, advantage to the AI that has no/minimal concept of the value of time.

clolege 4y ago
Yeah this is one of the reasons why I find it more dull than chess. There is an incentive to just not move your pieces, so that the other player thinks they're bombs. As a result, players only activate 2-3 pieces at a time. In chess, on the other hand, you are constantly moving your pawns to the other side to promotion, or otherwise trying to activate/coordinate all of your pieces for an attack. It makes me think that if deepmind for Stratego was trained to not lose instead of win, then the top strategy might be shuffling pieces and letting the enemy come to attack. No human would ever have the patience to play that way though.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pmontra 4y ago
  Chess has the 50 moves rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty-move_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty-move_rule about A "player can claim a draw if no capture has been made and no pawn has been moved in the last fifty moves"
- aidenn0 4y ago
  > It makes me think that if deepmind for Stratego was trained to not lose instead of win, then the top strategy might be shuffling pieces and letting the enemy come to attack. No human would ever have the patience to play that way though. Tournament Stratego uses a clock, which reduces some of the issue there. It's not hard to beat a player that does what you suggest; just send some middling pieces after each piece that moves. You'll take the weak pieces and reveal the strong pieces. It is much more defensive than chess in general though, as moving a piece and capturing with a piece both give the other player information.
  - 4y ago

VHRanger 4y ago

FWIW one of the big things poker AI taught humans is massive overbets (eg. going all in for $200 over a $15 pot). This is scary to do well in practice, because the mathematically optimal bluff frequency approaches 50% as you increase the overbet size.

clolege 4y ago
Wow, that's crazy. It seems like it would be easier for AI to do, since it doesn't have any tells (it's easier to have a poker face when you don't have a face at all). I remember playing poker as a kid, and experimenting with pretending like my cards were good/bad with body language. I don't think that any professional players use that approach (they just have sunglasses and a straight face), but I wonder if AI could beat humans even more consistently if it developed a way to convey tells and fake tells?
- VHRanger 4y ago
  All Poker AIs developped as yet approaches Nash Equilibrium -- it's just a "perfect" strategy that wins by default because it makes no mistakes. Since you make mistakes against the AI strategy, and the sum of the game of poker is 0, you lose by default. No poker bots yet I know of have developed "exploitative" strategies, where they deviate from the Nash Equilibrium strategy to exploit opponent mistakes. Back when I played professionally (2012-2016, poker AIs being relevant in 2015/16) the standard was to use a bot to study the best default strategies and use expert human judgement to deviate from it against bad opponents.
  - clolege 4y ago
    Nash equilibriums exist when bluffing is involved? It seems like it would introduce a level of predictability that would make it easier to know when the opponent is bluffing.
    - aetherane 4y ago
      A strategy can involve probability, like bluff 30% of time.

throwup 4y ago

Fascinating games. But I played a lot of Stratego as a kid, and I remember 1 was the strongest piece and 9 was the weakest. In these videos it seems 10 is strongest and 2 is weakest and that's making it confusing to watch. Did the pieces change sometime in the past 40 years or am I imagining things?

alan-crowe 4y ago
I've just watched a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQbGHgaWbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQbGHgaWbM that talks about "original" Stratego, a game created in 1947 by Jacques Johan Mogendorff. It might be nostalgic for you. Searching to find out whether "original" is the current version, I've noticed that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratego#Versions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratego#Versions answers your question "European versions of the game give the Marshal the highest number (10), while the initial American versions give the Marshal the lowest number (1) to show the highest value (i.e. it is the #1 or most powerful tile). More recent American versions of the game, which adopted the European system, caused considerable complaint among American players who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s."
- NoddingPudding 4y ago
  I just checked my UK eighties version and the Marshal is 1 on the board
- throwup 4y ago
  I guess that makes me one of those complaining Americans. If I ever get back into the game, I'll have to get used to the new numbers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]