Ataraxos AI beats Stratego great Pim Niemeijer 15-1 on just 16 GPUs

Machines have been embarrassing human champions for decades. Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, and poker bots have been taking professionals’ money for years. Stratego was the holdout. Now it has fallen too, and the AI that did it was trained for less than the price of a decent used car. A research team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford built an AI called Ataraxos. In a 20-game series, it beat Pim Niemeijer, widely regarded as the greatest Stratego player ever, by a score of 15 wins, 1 loss, and 4 draws. The match and the money The series took place in July 2025. Ataraxos finished with an 85% win rate against Niemeijer. In live exhibition matches in August 2025, the system faced attendees at a Stratego championship and went 38 wins to 2 losses, a 95% win rate. The more surprising number is the cost. Training ran for about one week on 16 Nvidia H100 GPUs. A further four days on four GPUs refined a component called the belief network. The total bill came in under $8,000. That is a striking contrast with earlier attempts. DeepMind’s DeepNash reportedly required millions in computational costs and still did ...