With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now
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With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
hnedeotes · · focus · HN ↗
Those new additions can invalidate the whole training data by a single new "card" 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.
gus_massa · · focus · HN ↗
IIUC most of them just put a standard chess engine over the new rules. I consider I'm not a bad player, but the engines destroys me, even with the weird rules.
* <a href="https://chess39.com/" rel="nofollow">https://chess39.com/ I only win if the computer start with a very bad initial position and in the first 2 or 3 moves I get huge advantage, because I slowly lose the advantage. Hopefully the game ends before I lose all the initial wins. Sometimes the computer "gives up" and exchange pieces unnecessary, that is not the optimal strategy when you assume the opponent (in this case me) is a worse player. Perhaps it's necessary to train to AI to pay assuming the opponent may blunder.
* [Another variant I can't find now. Each piece changes when it moves P->N->B->R-Q->P->...] The changes of the pieces confuses the engine too much and it's easy to win using some tricks. I guess some variants are just too different and need a lot of additional training.
hnedeotes · · focus · HN ↗
I used to play a bit of chess when I was young too, but never sticked to it nor got good at it either, but the complexity is pretty low relative to other games - specially when we talk about automated/bot scenarios.
In the variant you mention now imagine that every piece can have hundreds of different interactions depending on the other pieces on the table plus other pieces outside the table that the bot can't know for sure - I would imagine it would make the bot much weaker overall and specially against a good player independently from training - it just doesn't seem to make mathematical sense that it wouldn't but it's not my area of research so I can be missing some important thing.
gus_massa · · focus · HN ↗
[spoiler alert]
My favorite strategy for Ches39 is using 13 bishops in the 4 and 3 ranks. That is outside the training set, or at least any sensible training set. (Protip: Learn how to check mate with only two bishops of different colors.)
For the reverse I'd like to give the AI 13 knights, that would overwhelm any human player. I never dare to try it.
And I think the wall of 39 pawns is a good idea for a human, but for some reason the AI beats me anyway.
vikingerik · · focus · HN ↗
The key is to make sure you never leave a defensive opening - you have to watch out for two enemy pieces attacking a pawn that's defended only once. The computer/opponent will sacrifice the first piece to get the second to break through behind the pawn ranks, and it can often demolish all the pawns from there or checkmate your cramped king.