Hacker News Reader

Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you are that familiar with how good Stratego is played. It isn't strictly a memorize where your opponents units are. There's a significant degree of bluffing and posturing.

View on HN

It isn't strictly about memorizing where your opponents are, but having a perfect memory would be an enormous advantage, the point of being an entirely different game imo.

Yes, playing it as a kid I remember one pretty common thing to do was to make movements that made it easy for your opponent to get confused about whether a piece was that known piece or something else. Not the whole strategy but take that piece out and you definitely change the game I would think relative to typical human play. Especially in the context of it normally being more of a kids game.

Seems like it would be easy to test. See how the AI does when revealed pieces stay revealed compared to a standard game.

Also, given this is online competitive play likely that a significant portion of top human players are cheating and have aides to keep track of pieces.

> Seems like it would be easy to test. See how the AI does when revealed pieces stay revealed compared to a standard game.

It would effectively need to be a different AI to use that information. And what does it play? Humans? Other AI?

> Also, given this is online competitive play likely that a significant portion of top human players are cheating and have aides to keep track of pieces.

That's a great point. It may even be condoned in some circles.

The pace in online games is too fast (4s per move usually, with a 12m buffer) to use pen and paper aides. Short of having some sort of screen-scrabbing AI-tool that auto-labels pieces as they are revealed (doable by a decent programmer, but Stratego is no poker, there's no money in it), I think it's safe to assume top-level players don't cheat. Top-level play in live tournaments has a high correlation with top-level online play as well.

Most good players of stratego have perfect memory of all revealed information during a game. That's basic table stakes for playing, like memorizing the dictionary is for scrabble or memorizing openings for chess. It isn't very hard to do, since most moves don't reveal the value of piece and those moves to do reveal a piece tend to led to the destruction of that piece within a move or two. A computer isn't going to have an advantage there.

To the extent that machines can’t replicate. If I place my hand on a piece that’s illegal to move, feign that I’m reconsidering, and then move a different piece, then my opponent may suspect that the originally touched piece may be moved.

How can I use these 200 IQ moves against a bot?

This does not apply when playing machines. Like facial expressions or gestures do not apply when playing poker with machines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com