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Mastering Stratego

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Re: Mastering Stratego

#81

Post by 10xDev »

astrange wrote: post #78
10xDev wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know how well it is generalising to your input without knowing the training data. Failure cases however tell us a lot, such as the following: Input: "If five cats can catch five mice in five minutes, how long will it take one cat to catch one mouse?" Output: "If five cats can catch five mice in five minutes, then it will take one cat one minute to catch one mouse. This is because the number of cats and mice…

> We don't know how well it is generalising to your input without knowing the training data Are you claiming its training data has letter permutations of the word “Wikipedia”? It’s actually pretty capable of doing basic combinatorics.

I am not claiming anything other than the fact that we do not know the training data therefore not much can be inferred about how well it generalises from some success case.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#82

Post by throwthudec1 »

hgsgm wrote: post #59
topaz0 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that? The article says that one of the coauthors used to be a world champion, which suggests to me that there is some kind of competitive organized league.

How many people study Stratego as much as an International Master studies chess?

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 Grandmaster, #461 in the world in chess amongst ~300k active FIDE players. By your "International Masters study hard" logic, when you drop him into Age of Empires 2, a game with ~500 competitive tournament players, his work ethic should dominate. But it turns out that the top ~100 AoE2 players are really damn good and practice a ton (easily chess IM amounts), and Fedex tops out around ~#50 in the world.

https://ratings.fide.com/profile/117927 https://liquipedia.net/ageofempires/Fedex

Re: Mastering Stratego

#83

Post by sophiebits »

turtledragonfly wrote: post #74

Tangentially taking this opportunity to mention the far-superior "Lying and Cheating" version of Stratego, that (as far as I know) my father invented. It makes the game so much more interesting, IMO. Played it a lot as a child. Here are the basic rules, when a piece is attacked: * The attacker says what their piece is, without showing it (they can lie) * The defender says whether they believe that * The defender says…

The bluffing rules are similar to the game Coup, if you’re not familiar.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#84

Post by sdwr »

throwthudec1 wrote: post #82
hgsgm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people study Stratego as much as an International Master studies chess?

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 information. (Getting sick of hearing about cognitive biases and product-market fit and dunning kruger, ffs). I've seen it with dota over the last 10 years. Pro players were always good, but now bad players are good and pro players are better. Not to mention the motivation that comes from seeing other people work hard.

When it comes to stratego, watching the linked games (from an armchair!), the human players looked relatively sloppy. Overusing scouts in the early game, too eager to trade, noticed a piece being forgotten about once. Not to say I'd be better, but it definitely looks like the scene is "for fun" and not so serious.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#85

Post by fnbr »

jstummbillig wrote: post #2

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?

I don’t think it is more challenging than StarCraft or Dota. Does the blog post claim that anywhere?

Stratego is way more challenging than Poker, though. StarCraft/Dota/Stratego have the property that you can’t represent their imperfect information as a vector in memory, whereas you can easily do that in Texas hold’em poker (there’s only 52C2 = 1024 possible hands). So for those games, you have to use an approximate distribution rather than the exact one.

I’m an author on this paper (although my contributions were relatively minimal) and on the Player of Games paper (which did Poker, Chess, and Go).

Re: Mastering Stratego

#86

Post by mst »

rosmax_1337 wrote: post #15
machina_ex_deus wrote: post #5

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…

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)

I periodically still drop in to Subspace/Continuum Trench Wars and in a multi hour play session will generally spend the first hour dogfighting and then get annoyed with the performance of my assigned team and switch to a command ship and spend a lot more time typing encouraging other pilots to do the sensible thing than I do actually fighting.

Both modes of play are fun, mind, but the parallels struck me as worth noting.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#87

Post by eru »

clolege wrote: post #60
VHRanger wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Poker AIs developped as yet approaches Nash Equilibrium -- it's just a "perfect" strategy that wins by default because it makes no mistakes. Since you make mistakes against the AI strategy, and the sum of the game of poker is 0, you lose by default. No poker bots yet I know of have developed "exploitative" strategies, where they deviate from the Nash Equilibrium strategy to exploit opponent mistakes. Back when I…

Nash equilibriums exist when bluffing is involved? It seems like it would introduce a level of predictability that would make it easier to know when the opponent is bluffing.

> Nash equilibriums exist when bluffing is involved?

In some sense that's the whole point of Nash equilibria.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#88

Post by fnbr »

waprin wrote: post #4

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 mor…

It’s very hard to use CFR in Stratego because you can’t represent the hidden information in memory. In poker, the hidden information is a 52C2 vector, so you can easily pass it around. Not so in Stratego, so you have to do something else. RNAD has similar theoretical foundations though.

Re: Mastering Stratego

#89

Post by topaz0 »

hgsgm wrote: post #59
topaz0 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that? The article says that one of the coauthors used to be a world champion, which suggests to me that there is some kind of competitive organized league.

How many people study Stratego as much as an International Master studies chess?

I don't know. How many?

Re: Mastering Stratego

#90

Post by michaf »

astrange wrote: post #48
10xDev wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fancy wikipedia chatbot. Nothing to do with generalisation.

It generalizes as well as GPT-3 does: --- If you took the word "Wikipedia", and threw all the letters up in the air, what are some possible things they'd spell once they fell on the ground again? If you took the word "Wikipedia" and threw all the letters up in the air, some possible things they could spell once they fell on the ground again might include "kawipieda," "keiapwidi," "kipedwaia," "pwakieida," or "eipawik…

Quite interesting that it will make subtle errors in its otherwise reasonable-looking answer, e.g. "kipedwaia" has two "a"s; "kawipieda", "kipedwaia" and "pwakieida" have only two "i"s.

I have seen reports that it will happily hallucinate a plausible but wrong answer to all sorts of different prompts, intermixed with many mostly correct answers. It's interesting to think about how to place trust in such a system.

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