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Mastering Stratego

deepmind.com

111–120 of 128 posts

Re: Mastering Stratego

#111

Did anyone else call the dude with the tall hat "Hat Guy" despite them all having hats?

Of course, yes!

Ha, amazing! I always thought it was a thing but then occurred to me that it was maybe just my friends and me who said this. I'm glad to know it's a thing.

Thinking back it may have been the sergeant who was the primary Hat Guy as I remember there was "Hat Guy" and later "Other Hat Guy".

Re: Mastering Stratego

#112

What happened to mastering StarCraft? Why did these guys give up after a mid tier pro player defeated the bot handily on live stream? They were super enthusiastic up until that point.

Have a link to that?

Very interesting question btw. I'm also interested in the StarCraft AI state of the art 2022. If it exists. Or was focused changed to some other game?

Re: Mastering Stratego

#113
post #112

What happened to mastering StarCraft? Why did these guys give up after a mid tier pro player defeated the bot handily on live stream? They were super enthusiastic up until that point.

Have a link to that? Very interesting question btw. I'm also interested in the StarCraft AI state of the art 2022. If it exists. Or was focused changed to some other game?

Just look for deepmind StarCraft in YouTube. It won the first event but people came on top during the second event which turned out to be the last one if memory serves

Re: Mastering Stratego

#114
post #104

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 approac…

Alternative theory. The actual models work fantastically well. The board games are merely a cover to advertise to AI Researchers and portray AI as "innocent" in the public eye. Stratego is Google goofing off. The Ferrari AI models are being used by Google to absolutely swindle money in some ad tech niche.

Or on Youtube as attention-retainers. It's really good at drip-feeding content over weeks/months, and changes what videos are recommended based on the duration of the viewing session.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that heads-up only? Early massive overbets are nearly a coin toss in heads-up, so you break even in on a call and win on a fold, which is an equilibrium. However at a large table, you are going to get called only by the person who thinks they have the best hand, which is a lot better than the average hand of a typical opponent.

Its more common in heads up, yes. In multiplayer you see it where ranges are narrowed, like 3bet pots or on turn/river It matters less than you'd think because overbets imply you have a polarized range (nuts or air). You generally pick the bluffs to be hands that have cards blocking the best calling hand combinations.

Okay, that makes sense. I think it matters some still because if someone else has nuts, then they automatically know you are bluffing, and the more players still in the pot the more likely one of them has nuts.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#116
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me think that if deepmind for Stratego 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. Tournament Stratego uses a clock, which reduces some of the issue there. It's not hard to beat a player that does what you suggest; just send some middling pieces after each piece t…

> It's not hard to beat a player that does what you suggest; just send some middling pieces after each piece that moves. You'll take the weak pieces and reveal the strong pieces. But taking a strong piece means revealing a stronger piece of you own. That’s why I think the best strategy is to put almost all your weak pieces up front.,and wait for your enemy to reveal their pieces. Scouts, especially, are canon fodder…

Having scouts in the mid/late game is important to make them play more cautiously with their spy, since a scout can take out a spy from any straight-line path.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#117
post #70
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A common variation of the game is to let the aggressor win battles where both pieces have the same value. The default is a draw. This promotes aggression.

The other variant that would be interesting here is where only the attacker (or alternatively the defender) reveal their rank.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

The highest I've been relative to the top was probably 4.8k in 2013. Nowadays I'm a party queue casual that's still around the same MMR haha.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's pretty tactical decisions, usually made in a time window of like 20-30 seconds top. Takes like 40 second to reach more than half the map from the base. Fighting decisions usually also get tactical. I would say that 90% of the game deciding decisions have a time window of less than 30 seconds to make. 70% are in a time window of seconds. You don't make a strategic decision to fight ever, you make tactical decis…

I feel that I generally know where I will play well in advance. Like before the game starts. At this point it just seems like semantics of what we think of strategy vs tactics if that's the case. As I think many of the things you see opportunistically while I decide I know when I'm going to fight in advance and I put myself in opportunistic positions at those times.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#120
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are probably very much diminishing returns. A small scene is probably pretty damn good at the top. Having hundreds of thousands of competitive players helps, but even with a small sample you are probably likely to get at least some very, very strong players. It's hard to think of a relevant real world example, but a fun corollary I'm familiar with is Fedex (Federico Perez Ponsa). He is a full chess Gran…

Love the real life example. No matter how good the top players are relative to the competition tho, I feel like a large playerbase still raises the skill bar to a huge degree. There's a ratchet effect where someone figures something out, other people copy, and it breaks into public consciousness through influencers and popularizers. Then on the tail end, regular people regurgitate it for years like it's new informati…

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