With most information hidden, the game Stratego
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.
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. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it.
## Hidden armies
In *Stratego*, each player gets 40 pieces representing military ranks, from a marshal down to a spy, plus bombs and a flag. You win by capturing the opponent's flag. Your opponent knows *where* your pieces are, but not *what* they are. Identities are revealed only when two pieces collide in battle—the weaker one is removed, and the identity of the winner is revealed. That makes *Stratego* an imperfect-information game, just like poker, which computers cracked years ago. “There's something super distinctive about *Stratego*, which is that it is a massive amount of hidden information that unfolds over a very long time scale,” said Eugene Vinitsky, a researcher at NYU and co-author of the study.
[Read full article][1]
[Comments][2]
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/ai-finally-beat-the-best-stratego-player-in-history-and-did-it-on-a-budget/
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/ai-finally-beat-the-best-stratego-player-in-history-and-did-it-on-a-budget/#comments
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/ai-finally-beat-the-best-stratego-player-in-history-and-did-it-on-a-budget/
npub1ls…2cgqv
2026-10-01 16:46:35 UTC
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npub1ls4n6xlwcglrwf667mawh047cr3lkxyevnt7lax0wywj9809xgqqg2cgqvPublished at
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"content": "With most information hidden, the game Stratego\n\nDeep 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.\n\nNow, 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. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it.\n\n## Hidden armies\n\nIn *Stratego*, each player gets 40 pieces representing military ranks, from a marshal down to a spy, plus bombs and a flag. You win by capturing the opponent's flag. Your opponent knows *where* your pieces are, but not *what* they are. Identities are revealed only when two pieces collide in battle—the weaker one is removed, and the identity of the winner is revealed. That makes *Stratego* an imperfect-information game, just like poker, which computers cracked years ago. “There's something super distinctive about *Stratego*, which is that it is a massive amount of hidden information that unfolds over a very long time scale,” said Eugene Vinitsky, a researcher at NYU and co-author of the study.\n\n[Read full article][1]\n\n[Comments][2]\n\n[1]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/ai-finally-beat-the-best-stratego-player-in-history-and-did-it-on-a-budget/\n[2]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/ai-finally-beat-the-best-stratego-player-in-history-and-did-it-on-a-budget/#comments\n\n\nhttps://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/ai-finally-beat-the-best-stratego-player-in-history-and-did-it-on-a-budget/",
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