GoKawiilAtaraxos AI defeats top-ranked Stratego player Pim Niemeijer 15-1
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, NYU and Stanford built an AI called Ataraxos that beat Pim Niemeijer, widely regarded as the best Stratego player ever, 15 games to one with four draws. The system was trained using just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars, a tiny fraction of what projects like DeepMind's earlier Stratego attempts required.
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Stratego's decillions of possible piece arrangements and games that can stretch to 2,000 moves made it a much harder hidden-information problem than poker, where only two cards are concealed, researchers note. Ataraxos's low training cost suggests that algorithmic advances rather than raw computing power may be driving progress on bluffing-heavy, long-horizon games, which could extend to other domains involving sustained deception and incomplete information.
- Ataraxos beat the top-ranked human Stratego player 15-1 with 4 draws.
- The AI was trained with only 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars.
- Stratego's decillions of hidden setups and 2,000-move games made it harder for AI than chess, Go, or poker.
Stratego Original Strategy Board Game — Now that AI has finally cracked Stratego, it's the perfect time to rediscover why this hidden-information strategy classic has stumped both humans and machines for so long. Grab a board and test your own deduction skills against friends or family, matching wits over bluffing and strategic deployment just like the game Ataraxos mastered.
See Stratego Original Strategy Board Game on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: arstechnica.com, 2026-10-01
Published there as: “With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI—until now”
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