DeepMind on Stratego, an imperfect information game

I am a Stratego player, and the answer is no, not really. In fact, DeepNash won 30/30 (100%) against Probe, which won Computer Stratego World Championship three times in the past.

But I think Paul is not wrong. While Stratego is mostly skill not luck (it's not like you are drawing cards and you need good cards, there is zero randomness, just hidden information), there is a bit of rock-paper-scissors involved. Novices can't beat experts, but I do think experts can beat God.

My main point was that you quoted 42% when the win rate was 84%.

Even if there's no cap on winrate, I don't think you should necessarily expect to "self-improve to beat the best human players every time." Even in a game of perfect information I think there are 2+ orders of magnitude of scale (or equivalent algorithmic progress) where you will beat human players 60-99% of the time.

So I think it could make sense to be surprised "Isn't Stratego easy enough that AI should be crushing humans?" but it would not make sense to say "Given that AI is able to beat humans at Stratego, why is it not able to crush them every time?"

(Note that humans could potentially do better if they knew they were playing against a much stronger opponent and trying to play for a lucky win.)

It doesn't have to be that a novice has a chance against an expert, in order for there to be declining returns to further expertise.  As an example, rock-scissors-paper-nothing (rock beats scissors and nothing, scissors beats paper and nothing, paper beats rock and nothing) has the "expert" strategy of "randomize, but never choose "nothing"), which beats the incredible-novice who chooses "nothing" most of the time.  Further, there is expertise in noticing patterns among your opponents, while obscuring the patterns that such prediction brings to your plays.  But very good AI can probably do better than 50% against human experts, without getting anywhere near 100%.

84% for Stratego is higher than I'd have predicted.