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Superhuman AI for Stratego (arxiv.org)
5 points by droidjj 1 day ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: An AI learned Stratego by playing against itself and searching ahead at each move, even though it cannot see the opponent's pieces. It beats top human players by a wide margin, for a few thousand dollars instead of millions.

Abstract · Superhuman AI for Stratego Using Self-Play Reinforcement Learning and Test-Time Search

Few classical games have been regarded as such significant benchmarks of artificial intelligence as to have justified training costs in the millions of dollars. Among these, Stratego -- a board wargame exemplifying the challenge of strategic decision making under massive amounts of hidden information -- stands apart as a case where such efforts failed to produce performance at the level of top humans. This work establishes a step change in both performance and cost for Stratego, showing that it is now possible not only to reach the level of top humans, but to achieve vastly superhuman level -- and that doing so requires not an industrial budget, but merely a few thousand dollars. We achieved this result by developing general approaches for self-play reinforcement learning and test-time search under imperfect information.

Samuel Sokota, Eugene Vinitsky, Hengyuan Hu, J. Zico Kolter, Gabriele Farina
arXiv:2511.07312 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Nov 10, 2025
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Also discussed: Nov 2025 (2 points, 1 comment)

I've added this link to the toptext of this related ongoing thread:

With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI–until now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49933740