While artificial intelligence long ago surpassed human capability in Chess, and more recently Go — and let us not forget Doom — other more complex board games still present a challenge to computer systems. Until very recently, Stratego and Diplomacy were two of those games, but now AI has become table-flipping good at the former and passably human at the latter.
On the surface, you might think that it’s just because these games require a certain level of long-term planning and strategy. But so do Go and Chess, just in a different way.
The crucial difference is actually that Stratego and Diplomacy are games of strategy based on imperfect information. In Chess and Go, you can see every piece on the board. Stratego hides the identity of pieces until they are encountered by another piece, and Diplomacy is largely about establishing agreemen...
