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Mastering Stratego

deepmind.com

11–20 of 128 posts

Re: Mastering Stratego

#11

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?

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.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#13
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

Re: Mastering Stratego

#14
post #7

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...

Wow! Thanks to DeepMind for OpenSpiel! Am looking forward to ai experimenting with Stratego, Battleships & Hanabi ;)

Re: Mastering Stratego

#15

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?

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% tactic…

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)

Re: Mastering Stratego

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% tactic…

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?

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.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#17
post #13

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 h…

Are these games against stratego masters? I'm watching the first one, but it doesn't say who they're playing against

Re: Mastering Stratego

#18
post #17
post #13

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 h…

Are these games against stratego masters? I'm watching the first one, but it doesn't say who they're playing against

yep, top anonymized players

Re: Mastering Stratego

#19
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).

Re: Mastering Stratego

#20
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?
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