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

288 points · 149 comments · PaulHoule

  1. hnedeotes · · focus · HN ↗
    I think that what makes these games beatable repeatedly is that they&#x27;re static. Not saying an algorithm properly trained won&#x27;t play better than the average player a game like MtG, or my own <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aethersummon.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aethersummon.com (specially now while it has under 90 possible scrolls only) but if you have a regular release cadence (say weekly or bi-weekly) of relevant new &quot;cards&quot;, then I think the playing field is much more even for humans.

    Those new additions can invalidate the whole training data by a single new &quot;card&quot; that changes completely the dynamics and would be easy for a player to understand and incorporate but not for an algorithm (perhaps with enough compute to re-train it regularly it could) - that along with the decision trees being orders of magnitude deeper, wider and with more conditionalities than go, chess or stratego - even through the same turn with the same cards available and same table state - would probably pose much harder problems for a compute bound algo.

    1. qsort · · focus · HN ↗
      There are very few missing pieces for a game like MTG. The main reasons we don&#x27;t have a Stockfish for MTG is that it&#x27;s a PITA to implement the rules and that nobody cares (or at least not enough to make it happen.)

      There is nothing that, in principle, makes MTG different from poker or bridge, and we have superhuman engines for both.

      1. wavemode · · focus · HN ↗
        &gt; There is nothing that, in principle, makes MTG different from poker or bridge

        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.

        I&#x27;m sure you could train a neural network to play a specific deck within a specific metagame of a specific card game, but you would probably have to keep re-training it when there are new decks&#x2F;combos&#x2F;releases&#x2F;rotations&#x2F;banlists&#x2F;metagame shifts.

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