Researchers from CMU, MIT, NYU, and Stanford built Ataraxos, an AI that decisively beat Pim Niemeijer—arguably the best Stratego player ever—at a 15-1 score with four draws. Unlike prior attempts including DeepMind's budget-heavy efforts, Ataraxos achieved this using only 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars, tackling Stratego's massive hidden-information complexity over long game timescales.
Background
Stratego is a classic board game of imperfect information where players hide piece identities on a shared board, making it significantly harder for AI than perfect-information games like chess or Go. Prior AI attempts, including DeepMind's, failed to reliably beat top human players despite large budgets.
- Source
- Ars Technica
- Published
- Oct 2, 2026 at 12:28 AM
- Score
- 8.0 / 10