This game-playing AI is the new champ at Stratego

A new AI system that excels at challenging games with hidden information could someday help human decision-makers select ideal strategies to outfox opponents in complicated situations like military maneuvers. Using advances in machine-learning, researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, and Stanford University developed an AI that defeated top-ranked human players of the board wargame Stratego by a large margin — something no AI system had been able to achieve. Stratego, a two-player game of imperfect information, in which the opponent’s piece identities remain hidden, is often used as a benchmark to test the strategic thinking abilities of powerful AI models. To build their model, the researchers combined efficient training algorithms with…