With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now

5 hours ago (arstechnica.com)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11036-y

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07312

Oh no! Stratego had been on my mind as something we just hadn't tried hard enough to make a winning bot for, including the DeepMind effort from 2022. I was planning to make the first one.

I thought this was slightly less crank-coded than trying to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, but maybe these days you just ask Claude to do that and it tells you there's a counterexample at 1 + πi that no one ever noticed before.

I recall playing this game as a preschooler. It was mostly psychology and bluff. Very interesting.

This puts the earlier "Mastering the Game of Stratego with Model-Free Multiagent Reinforcement Learning", 2022 [1] in some perspective. Apparently the "mastering" in 2022 wasn't quite there yet. Four years later, the new approach seems to actually be better than humans.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.15378

Wait, wasn't there that strong stratego bot that came out from deepmind in 2022?

  • The article talks about that. The new bot required two orders of magnitude less training data and plays better.

    • Awesome, I will read this carefully later today. I'm always excited by AI research applied to games.