Off topic: stratego engine

[Kempelen]

How difficult would be to make an engine to play stratego? are there any resources or ideas to share?

[hgm]

It would be easy to make one, but it might be difficult to make a strong one.

[kbhearn]

It'd represent a different challenge than a chess engine as it's partial information but getting something that plays a legal game together shouldn't be too hard.

In terms of making it play well it'd be quite a challenge - i expect for each opponent piece you'd want to track what you know about it and combine it with some opponent modelling information to create probability distributions for opponent pieces and then seeing as you don't know what the exact position is probably use guided monte carlo simulations that execute varied, reasonably coherent strategies (the next move in a playout should depend on the moves so far)

Probably this would be a good game to play around with that neural net stuff to make a lot of the parts :)

[flok]

There is (or was) actually a whole bunch of people writing stratego programs.
I also did so a while ago https://www.vanheusden.com/java/Miles/