[HN Gopher] Mastering Stratego ___________________________________________________________________ Mastering Stratego Author : beefman Score : 97 points Date : 2022-12-01 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.deepmind.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.deepmind.com) | [deleted] | beefman wrote: | The paper is sadly paywalled. I believe this is the preprint: | | https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.15378 | waprin wrote: | Great article. I played Stratego a lot as a kid and it always | felt simpler than chess, go , or poker so it's surprising it's a | much bigger game tree unless you stop and think. | | I'm curious about the comparisons to poker. I know the hot | algorithm in poker solvers is counter factual regret | minimization. The article indicates that the feedback cycle is | too long for those algorithms to work but I'd be curious to learn | more about the relationship from CFR to what's tried here, if | any. | _HMCB_ wrote: | I played it too. My goodness what a blast from the past. To be | honest, none of my friends liked to play. I mostly played by | myself it seems. LOL. | sdwr wrote: | I remember seeing a version of the paper earlier in the year (it | talked a lot about getting the bot to be aggressive to avoid | stalemates). | | Feels like the secret sauce has to be probability distributions | guessing what all the pieces are. | | Bluffing in stratego _seems_ like it requires long-term planning | (if you move a 2 like a 10, you have to keep treating it like | that for the bluff to work). | dr_faustus wrote: | Call me a cynic but the fact that after almost 10 years of AI | hype we are still working our way down the list of popular board | games is a bit of a downer for me. I mean, having AIs to play | Stratego, Risk, Go, Diplomacy and what have you against sure is | nice. But there are literally billions of dollars spent on these | projects and I really come to the point where I just don't | believe anymore that the current AI approaches will ever | generalize to the real world, even in relatively limited scopes, | without the need for significant human intervention and/or | monitoring. What am I missing? | zaptrem wrote: | Have you tried this out yet? https://chat.openai.com/ | | It's been providing real value to me over the past day for | practicing Spanish, explaining Machine Learning concepts, and | doing fancy write-ups in LaTeX. And this one can't even use | Google yet! (other research teams have already created models | capable of doing so, it's only a matter of time until these | innovations are brought together in one place) | VHRanger wrote: | AI remains better than humans at anything that has well defined | rewards and small time gap between action and feedback | mechanism (either naturally, like poker, or by value function | engineering, like Go or Chess) | | The problem here is that it's missing the "glue" to more real | world applications. This is where more humdrum software | engineering comes in. | | Diplomacy in this is much more interesting than Stratego or | beating the next video game - it mixes cooperative game theory | with NLP and reinforcement learning. | runarberg wrote: | There was a time when I thought that maybe there was something | more to AI then a fancy statistical model when you need to fit | non-linear data. But I'm solidly on the belief now that AI is | precisely a very powerful statistical tool. I honestly think | there was never any real strategy of getting AI to anything | more then specialized learning for deeper inference using a lot | of computational power. | | Don't get me wrong, using AI for that purpose is pretty amazing | (but can also lead to some sketchy results if you don't know | what you are doing[1]) but pretending it will lead to some | "general AI" is nothing but hype IMO. And teaching AI to play | these board games better then a grandmaster only serves to | increase that hype. | | 1: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/15/20806384/social- | media-h... | pbronez wrote: | I'm not an AGI fanboy. I agree that the current line of | inquiry (ie deep learning) won't get us there. I think | neurosymbolic reasoning is needed. That work is still | nascent, and worse, we don't have great ways to connect our | current paradigm to it. | clolege wrote: | It's interesting to watch the videos they link of deepmind | playing against the top-level Stratego masters [0]. I usually | find Stratego to be a bit of a dull game (less elegant and more | drawn out than Go and chess), but I'm a sucker for watching top- | level AIs play. | | Its skills for bluffing are both fascinating and a bit scary. | | [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaUdWoSMjSY | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-9ZXmyNKgs | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOalLpAfDSs | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhNoYl_g8mo | ep103 wrote: | Are these games against stratego masters? I'm watching the | first one, but it doesn't say who they're playing against | sdwr wrote: | Dont think the player pool is very deep, doubt there are many | masters around.. | clolege wrote: | yep, top anonymized players | VHRanger wrote: | FWIW one of the big things poker AI taught humans is massive | overbets (eg. going all in for $200 over a $15 pot). | | This is scary to do well in practice, because the | mathematically optimal bluff frequency approaches 50% as you | increase the overbet size. | clolege wrote: | Wow, that's crazy. | | It seems like it would be easier for AI to do, since it | doesn't have any tells (it's easier to have a poker face when | you don't have a face at all). | | I remember playing poker as a kid, and experimenting with | pretending like my cards were good/bad with body language. I | don't think that any professional players use that approach | (they just have sunglasses and a straight face), but I wonder | if AI could beat humans even more consistently if it | developed a way to convey tells and fake tells? | sdwr wrote: | Watched some of the first game. I'd bet stratego favors | defence, advantage to the AI that has no/minimal concept of the | value of time. | clolege wrote: | Yeah this is one of the reasons why I find it more dull than | chess. | | There is an incentive to just _not_ move your pieces, so that | the other player thinks they 're bombs. As a result, players | only activate 2-3 pieces at a time. | | In chess, on the other hand, you are constantly moving your | pawns to the other side to promotion, or otherwise trying to | activate/coordinate all of your pieces for an attack. | | It makes me think that if deepmind was trained to _not lose_ | instead of _win_ , then the top strategy might be shuffling | pieces and letting the enemy come to attack. No human would | ever have the patience to play that way though. | jstummbillig wrote: | Can anyone shed light on in what way this is more challenging | than the starcraft or dota agents, which also had to work with | imperfect information? | Tenoke wrote: | Starcraft and Dota benefit a lot from having good micro. | Stratego seems to be only macro. Micro is easyish for AI and | requires less long-term thinking to get benefits from. | adgjlsfhk1 wrote: | Starcraft especially only resembles a strategy game in GM | (and maybe high masters). Below that, the strategy is mostly | macro better so you have more units. | machina_ex_deus wrote: | Dota is a pretty local game. 70% tactics, 20% strategy. Maybe | 10% information. Yes you have warding game but for an AI with | no cost of looking at heroes inventories (humans need to waste | attention and move their map) AI already has huge advantage | over humans in the imperfect information part. Usually fighting | into the imperfect information is the bad choice. | | Stratego is 40% information, 40% strategy, maybe 10% tactics. | If you know where is the flag it's trivial to win in almost all | situations. Fighting into imperfect information is literally | all the game. | ghostbrainalpha wrote: | Is Tactics the same thing as execution? | | Like is it just the speed of your clicking? Or is it more | than that, like the most basic kinds of strategic decisons? | keithnz wrote: | in dota the tactics is to do with the execution of | abilities, often times in coordination with other agents in | execution of their abilities to get combo effects while | adapting to the situation as it unravels. | dtdynasty wrote: | As an avid dota player I wouldn't agree with your | characterization that 70% of dota 2 is your definition of | tactics. What I've noticed differentiates player MMR the | most is the strategy applied to each context. It's rarely | the execution that's the problem as you can gain such | overwhelming advantages through strategy. | machina_ex_deus wrote: | There's barely any long term strategy in Dota, only | meaningful strategic decisions are items and heroes. Even | ultimate usage has like 2 minute window of importance. | Wards too. And maybe the decision to push high ground | because of how many times games are lost because of it, | but it's the tactical errors usually making most of the | difference there. | | What's your MMR, out of curiosity? | machina_ex_deus wrote: | It's from things like properly last hitting creeps, good | reaction timing, good reaction decisions, coordinating real | time actions with teammates in milliseconds resolution. | | It's obviously not about clicking fast, but it is about | timing, sometimes 100 milliseconds reaction time make huge | difference in outcome. It is usually making decisions on | very small time scales. Do you retreat or continue? Use | ability or hold it? Can you overextend? | | The only meaningful strategic decisions in dota (which you | have long time frame of deciding and effect the game for a | long duration) are draft (which AI doesn't really master, | they reduced the heroes pool to simplify) and item | purchases, and there are only a handful of them (~6) in an | entire game. Other decisions don't really have a long | "memory" time, a minute or two at the most. After two | minutes every other decision is just reduced to the | relative advantage between the teams. | | There used to be one hero in Dota which made it a strategy | game instead (techies). But it was like playing a different | game and everyone hated it and it was effectively removed. | Techies was like playing stratego against chess players, | they obviously get pissed off by not playing what they | wanted. | dtdynasty wrote: | There are larger strategic decisions that are significant | in dota. Which area of the map to play, which objectives | are important and when, what type of fights will we win | (fast and bursty) and when will we take them. Often times | these are thought of at the beginning of the game and | effect gameplay throughout. | rosmax_1337 wrote: | Dota at the mid-casual and high-casual brackets (which is | where you find most players) is also a social game. | Establishing efficient leadership, communication and | cooperation in a game gives you a huge advantage. And the | low-casual and the pro levels you find it becomes more a game | of skill and strategy funnily enough. | | (The old joke is that Dota is a 1 v 9 game, not a 5 v 5) | beefman wrote: | There's an extra space in the link to their code (at the end of | the article). The correct URL is: | | https://github.com/deepmind/open_spiel/tree/master/open_spie... | ArtWomb wrote: | Wow! Thanks to DeepMind for OpenSpiel! Am looking forward to ai | experimenting with Stratego, Battleships & Hanabi ;) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-01 23:00 UTC)