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I am also an ulumni of the U of A. More specifically I did my research in the games department, although not specifically on poker. I was sort of suprised the article never mentioned Darse Billings who is one of the main people behind poker agents at the U of A.

Here is a relevant link: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/

There's been a lot of postings about this tournament being bunk due to a lot of misconceptions about the game of poker. As a successful poker player of quite a few years and also a geek, I do believe I have an informed opinion here when I say that A) poker is profitable B) poker bots can and have been created C) the effort to code a high level poker bot is incredibly, incredibly difficult.

A team at the University of Alberta has been working on with a poker research group that has been researching and coding poker bots for years. One look at their page should tell you that there is definitely some high level thinking and analysis required to develop a poker bot. More importantly, is that fact that they *have* delivered a bot called Poki Poker that has an impressive record at beating human opponents in 1 vs 1 heads-up matches. Brian Alspach, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Statistics at Simon Fraser University has also contributed numerous publications to the field, giving credence to the fact that there is a genuine science behind creating an AI that can play good poker.

So, before anyone else spouts off about poker being a game of chance or poker bots being mindless hundred line pieces of code, please do your research. A lot of people have worked very hard on this subject to simply have it dismissed as beneath them. Just ask yourself this: If you could create a poker bot so easily, one that could generate at the very least, a poker bot that made $2/hr playing the low limit games, what would stop you from launching thousands of these bots upon the online world? Because unlike a human, you can replicate a bot innumerable times, which in this case would be the equivalent of finding the goose that lays golden eggs. If you understand this, you may begin to understand why there is so much interest in the creation of poker bots..

I did a little bit of work recently at UofA with the poker group.

Poker is a hard problem. The game tree is huge for even heads up limit (~ 10^18 leaf nodes). Ring games (3-10 players) are intractable via any game theoretic methods. The only feasible possibilities are searching parts of the game tree through intelligent sampling methods, and perhaps abstracting the game down a bit.

Work has focused on both solving abstracted versions of the game and exploiting opponent weaknesses. A publication concerning most recent methods involving bayesian best response will be available soon at the following link:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~finnegan/publications/p ublications.html

Just in case any one was wondering, calculating your raw chances of winning, dubbed "7 card roll out strength" is no problem at all once you harness the versatility of the gnu poker-eval library located on sourceforge.

Since Professor Jonathan Schaeffer was quoted in this article and I'm a UofA alumni, I feel obligated to link to Schaeffer's Chinook checkers playing program. You can actually play a (somewhat limited) version online.

[/shameless promotion]

Since Professor Jonathan Schaeffer was quoted in this article and I'm a UofA alumni, I feel obligated to link to Schaeffer's Chinook checkers playing program. You can actually play a (somewhat limited) version online.

[/shameless promotion]

While it may be unreasonable to demand that a student buy a particular model, that doesn't mean it is not done:

http://www.engineering.ualberta.ca/nav03.cfm?nav03 =19343&nav02=18510&nav01=18439

I graduated last year however, so the policy never affected me because my class complained enough so that only the people after us were stuck with this policy.

And the approved list was much stupider at the start as well, with calculators like the TI-82 (which I used to have) and the TI-83 not allowed, but the TI-83 plus WAS allowed.

It seems they've pulled the stick out of their ass a little bit.

Also read about it at the University of Alberta website

amen. The provincial surplus (yes, Alberta runs a $1Bsurplus each year thanks to eco-disaster they call athabasca oil sand/tar up there) steered to Education funding should improve the U of A research output even more. For what its worth, I thought their Ultra-low power Analog Decoding project (see http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id= 6245) has much more relevant short term applications in improving WiFi and Wireline communication chip-sets vs. this new single molecular transistors. -- too bad Dewey's closed.

Still I think this is very interesting news. This is very early research. The speed will probably be improved, and the smaller dimensions of single-molecyle transistors can give space for more hardware to compensate for the speed.

Or have a look at the home page of the researcher.

Also read about it at the University of Alberta website and in the Press release

h-bar.

Decoherence and biological feasibility. Computer simulations, experimental results and suggestions.

With all due respect .. what a load of cr*p.

Ever heard of Bill 101? It's a Quebec signage law "restricting access to English schools and prohibiting the use of English on commercial signs predominate on all signage" It's been ruled by the Supreme court to be a direct violation of the Charter of Rights & Freedom but guess what? The law has stood for over 20 years, despite the Supreme Court of Canada declaring it to be in violation of the Charter (Source: http://www.law.ualberta.ca/ccskeywords/bill_101.ht ml)

But wait .. it gets worse in the sacred Canadian legislation department - the Canadian Health Act whose second tenant proudly claims "all medically necessary services provided by hospitals and doctors must be insured". Again, completely violated by private for-profit MRI clinics in Montreal. (Source: http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2004/04/23/4339 05-cp.html)

If this comes off as Quebec bashing it wasn't intended as such. It was to point out that in Canada, the Charter can, is, and will be violated subject to the discretion of the ruling class.

Whenever the Sokal affair is mentioned, I wonder why so few people say anything about the Gordon Freeman affair at the Canadian Journal of Physics.

In 1989, "Kinetics of nonhomogeneous processes in human society: unethical behaviour and societal chaos," by Gordon Freeman (Can. J. Phys. 68, 794-798 (1990)) slipped through the peer-review process and was published in the Canadian Journal of Physics. In this paper, Freeman claimed to use nonlinear dynamics and chaos to demonstrate that feminism was responsible for the breakdown of ethical behavior in society, particularly relating to cheating by university students.

If the Sokal affair shows us that the field postmodernist science studies is full of nonsense, the Freeman affair shows us that physics is equally full of nonsense.

From TFA:

Mr Schwartz ran a demonstration of the service, showing how data could be processed in a protein folding experiment.

Of course, if your experiment is cool enough and academia-related, there are always other ways to get computing power. A similar chemistry experiment was performed using grid-computing in Canada, utilizing computing power from universities all across the country. http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~ciss/

Now, granted this wouldn't be applicable to a lot of businesses, which is Sun's target audience. But the CISS project has a cooler name :)

Where to begin... data clustering is very much an AI technique. I did my PhD dissertation on it, in an AI laboratory at a major research institution. That some techniques may be simple (such as k-means) does not mean that they fall outside of AI.

Clustering is also known as unsupervised learning, and is an essential tool for many other higher-level AI technologies, including machine vision.

The field of AI is very broad, broader than you probably think. It encompasses clustering. Pick up any good AI book or look at top conferences in the field and find out for yourself. AI has always had the problem that as soon as someone understands part of it, that part is no longer "intelligent" and is now just a "technique". By that logic, AI would not exist.

Ah. So it's not a basic human rights violation to limit the rights of linguistic minorities to conduct business or educate their children in their language of choice?

It's not a basic human rights violation to fine a person for placing an ad in a newspaper referencing -- not even quoting -- Bible verses that condemn homosexuality as amoral?

And don't get me started on the Notwithstanding Clause (i.e. "yeah, this law violates the Charter, but we really, really want to enact it anyway").

I like going to Canada, and there are some things Canada does better than the USA, but some Canadians need to get over themselves. Their self-righteousness stinks every bit as bad as its American counterpart.

Furthermore, their bots are good, and they have published the majority of how those bots work. Check it out.

Furthermore, their bots are good, and they have published the majority of how those bots work. Check it out.

I don't believe that it is 'cheating'. Not to quibble, but I would call it applying a previously unforseen meta-strategy. My interest in competitions such as this is for generated strategy in increasingly complex decisions (see also http://web.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsbpc.html), so the SH strategy doesn't interest me, but whether it is deemed (by the competition) a viable strategy or banned, it has performed a service. If a viable strategy, than the next batch has to prepare for it AND the TFT, and if banned, it revealed the option in order that it could be banned.

Bullshit. Thomas Jefferson lived to be 83. Average life expectancy was pulled drastically downward by infant and child mortality, but if you made it to age 21, you could expect to easily live into your 60's. Here's a quickie on the reasons why the "avg life expectancy was 25 in the stone age" theory is a load of crap based on statistical oversimplification.

"It took us [...] a few years to develop a program that could win consistently in higher-level games against opponents who took the game seriously. It has been successful against human players of average skill for many years now, but it is the only known program that can make that claim. [...] I expect there are a few now, yes. Perhaps more than a few. But are they a threat? Probably not. Many of them will be losing players, at least for a while. Their authors will either lose interest, or have to invest a lot of time and effort to improve their programs. If someone does succeed in writing a program that can grind out a small win, what difference should it make?"

Hmmm... I guess The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group is some kind of top secret project then, right?

If you think it would be _trivial_ to write a client, you're dead wrong. Go to U of Alberta website and read some of the papers, then tell me how easy it would be. I have been playing poker pretty seriously for 5+ years now, before the wonderful surge in popularity, and have plenty of CS background. It's not going to be as easy as everyone thinks.

You comments on BB/hour are interesting though, my understanding is that most bots can barely win at the micro-limits (0.05-0.10) much less a 2-4/3-6 game. I suspect they would get killed at 25-50 (although the 20-40 I played in Barcelona played essentially like a Bay Area 3-6 or 6-12, simply amazing stuff). The nice thing about bots is that they can be deployed en masse -- if you could actually beat a 2-4 game for 2BB/hour, and you ran a dozen of them, you're making about $100/hour, 24 hours a day. that's pretty nice.

Lastly, the scariest thing in the whole article is the guy who sells software to enable team play. That very threat is why I don't go near internet poker. It'd be too easy for me and 3 of my friends to sit at the same table and have an irc client open on the side sharing hand info.

Can you imagine knowing 4 sets of hole cards, and probably always having one player at either UTG/+1 and one player at button/cutoff?

ouch ouch ouch.

The 'human element' you talk about is present in face-to-face games, but in online games, you can't even see the other players! That's why bots can compete and disrupt the game. Maybe you can comment about playing poker in home/casino games, but I think your relatively informed view does not apply to this thread.

Look. Go here. Read about the bots. Play against the bots. Read the publications. There is a large AI element to holdem, whether done in person or online.

I have played online poker for about a year know. I have assumed I have played against bots on various occasions. I train against bots: http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/webgames/poker/

Like any software, they are only as good as the person who programmed them.

There is still one thing - The bots can't change the cards that are out on the table. I am fairly confident that the bots can outplay 60-70% of the people online, but they bots can not beat you unless it has the cards to do so!

Playing online poker is strictly a numbers game. With the human element removed, your left to make your decisions based on the cards as they are.

"The University of Alberta's Computer Poker Research Group has developed an artificially intelligent (poker playing) automaton known as "Vex Bot," "

At last! We Canadians have a piece of technology that can make us as proud as the mighty Canadarm!

The corewars site linked to in the story has never been known to be active or complete.

The KOTH server is home to the "pro" hills of which 94NOP is the most active.
The most up-to-date site for info & links is Fizmo's.

There are beginner's hills and others at
SAL hills
Yellow hills

There's also an IRC channel at irc://irc.koth.org#corewars

Ant wars looks interesting - pity the event is over

Tha printer isn't actually 3D, it only has 2 axis and the chocolate is only one layer thick.

Although there are plenty of actual 3D printers.

w00t, my first post using DVORAK.

How can that be when they're
so darn popular and sexy?

Believe it or not, this type of thing could be very useful to know. Sure, it's just a simple solder now, but what about other melted metals? For example, take 3D printing. Gravity tends to limit the types of shapes you can make, and the materials you can use. But what if we could 3D print steel? We could build a spaceship in record time! All we'd need are some "printer" robots and CAD software to control them!

So be careful about what you rag on. :-)

Actually, the University of Alberta has a pretty good network as far as security and patches are concerned, though your point is undoubtedly valid. The Computing Science department, particularly the undergraduate part thereof, is a huge supporter of OpenBSD and that is generally what the undergrad public machines run.

Fundamentally, I'm not sure what they could do differently. There's no doubt that it is a hostile environment, but the only alternative seems to be to simply shut down network access, something that just isn't reasonable at a university.

I should point out, of course, that the 4-seconds-to-0wn time is from the results of testing they did. None of the system administrators there would ever plug in a unpatched machine they weren't planning on immediately wiping.

The record shortest survival time, last time I checked, at the University of Alberta is four seconds. That's from the time they plugged in an unprotected Windows XP machine until the time it was compromised.

That's not enough time to engage your software firewall pre-SP2. I'm not sure of the condition post-SP2.

I was pleased to hear this announcement and am hopeful that other national library organizations will follow suit in their own jurisdictions - students should not be exposed to a single perspective on this or any issue. To quote Tony Samek, of the University of Alberta's School of Library and Information Studies, "The largest current threat to intellectual freedom in Alberta [Canada] is the dwindling numbers of Teacher-Librarians employed in the province." Who else will defend intellectual freedom in the K-12 system?

Wait, you didn't assume that was the whole point?

What's the story if somebody announces their brand new computer, completely free of any connection between components? In fact, I would like to announce my newest invention ...

A Beowulf cluster of Brand New (TM) Ultra Cool Pin-Free Computers.

If you are talking about creating an Artificial Intelligence to pass the Turing Test, then yes. For those not in the know, the Turing Test is a test for artificial intelligence based on social interactions. If a person interacting with an entity on-screen cannot tell if that entity is a human or an AI, then the AI passes the test and is considered "intelligent".

The problem with the Turing Test is that it biases AI towards a human-style intelect, where that might not be the best way (or even a good way) to make an AI. For all we know, a good AI might have a thought-process which, to us, would seem completely crazy.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "a good desktop system". I think OpenBSD is a great desktop system pretty much straight out of the box (use it as my desktop at work and home). Pretty much everything you need you will find in the ports tree (most will have pre-built packages on the CDs). I've used Linux and OpenBSD side by side for some time and the only things I can do with Linux that I can't do with OpenBSD are: hardware 3D acceleration (no OpenBSD drivers) and running certain binary only Linux apps. I think the high security of OpenBSD is at least as important on the desktop as in firewalls these days. Imagine how much less spam and worms we would have floating around if everyone had nice hardened desktops.

Here's what I do for my OpenBSD desktop:

• install the msttcorefonts package (from ports tree) for nice fonts
• install Mozilla (again, ports tree)
• install my mp3 and ogg utilities (ditto)
• install mplayer (ditto ditto)

How is it meaningless? Is an abacus a computer under my definition? No. Why? Because it doesn't manipulate data, the person using it has to do that. Is an ignition switch a computer? No, it recieves input and gives output, but it doesn't manipulate data at all. And I really fail to see how Turing-equivalence comes into this. Although it has a precise definition, it appears you are unfamiliar with it.

From what I understand, MMC cards are SPI compatible. The serial peripheral interface (SPI) is available on all sorts of microcontrollers, from the 8-bit HC11 to the 32-bit MPC565. A 2GB MMC card could be great for data-logging in an embedded system, a robot, etc.

My only question is whether this MMC-4 standard the article talk about sticks to the SPI standard.

Technically, the Gamecube has 48MB of RAM, but the problem is that 24MB of the ram consists of relatively fast 1T-SRAM with a bandwidth of 2.6GB/sec and another 16MB of standard DRAM that has a bandwidth of only 81MB/sec. Here's a some good info on it

In contrast, the PS2 has 32MB of ram that runs at 3.2GB/sec (more linkage).

So, yeah, if your trying to feed geometry to the GPU the slower ram may not cut it. What some developers do (for example, lucasarts when they made jedi starfighter) is use the slower ram as a ramdisk "swap drive", or just use it to hold sound. In essence, though, you've got 8 megs less than a ps2.

My guess is this: If theywanted to make Driv3r for the Gamecube you could definitely do it (and make it look damn good), but it wouldn't be as easy as doing a simple port from the PS2 version. While profits may not have been the stated reason, perhaps revenue from the gamecube version were not worth the added cost/headache of porting.

Dunno... It's all speculation on my part. But the slow RAM issue isn't bullshit, for what it's worth.

Yes, poker is a game for mathematically-oriented geeks. In fact, the game is undergoing a revolution, with the savvy young players overthrowing the old guard, because they simply have better tools in their toolbox. Understanding how the other player thinks is still absolutely essential to playing at the top level, but there are also many mathematical concepts (beyond simple probabilities) that are very important to poker strategy.

In the old days of the Internet (before AOL), the newsgroup rec.gambling.poker had an incredibly high signal to noise ratio. Good players shared their insights, and many of them went on to be major stars in the poker world. I was just down at the WSoP and met with several of them (old friends and new acquaintances, many world champions among them).

Television has suddenly made poker into a spectacle, and the growth in popularity has been spectacular. Online poker is also booming, with thousands of geeks fleecing the millions of players who have less knowledge about the game.

If you want to learn more about this great game, visit some of the links on the The University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group home page. You will need to read a lot (especially the books by Sklansky and Malmuth), and practice a lot before you become a good player.

One good tool for providing endless hours of practice is the commercial version of our research programs, Poki's Poker Academy.

Now is a great time to have fun and augment your income playing poker.

- Darse.

( hey look moderators! it's the actual guy! :)

This is one of those exceedingly rare chances where I can actualy post something on /. while at work and consider it work related :-) I'm the lead programmer for a Poker training package called Poki's Poker Academy. Poki started as an Artificial Intelligence research project at the University of Alberta, where I did my MSc. We've recently commercialized the AI into the above product. The UofA research page is an excellent resource for geeks interested in poker. Our publications look at the math and algorithmics behind writing sophisticated poker AI. Poker is an incredibly geek friendly game. There is a lot of reward in being able to play analytically. The 'reading' of people is a much smaller part of the game than most folks think -- at the highest levels, the best players simply don't have any easy tells, so there is no point looking for any.

Yeah, she doesn't look like the prototypical geek chick, but then, neither do most of the other geek chicks I know. If nothing else, it's good to see that females are becomming more common in the Engineering universe.

I am a McGill alumnus, so I am biased...

There is a strong American presence at the undergraduate level (nearly 20% of the international student population) so by virtue of that, McGill is *somewhat* well-known in the northeastern U.S., at least among college-bound kids and their parents.

See this article on McGill University for an idea. Many of the alumni are household names in the U.S.

Consider this also: public reputation is not the same as academic reputation.

The McGill name may not be well-known to the U.S. public, but in academic circles it sparks recognition.

Also, I am not sure if it really is much harder to get a job with a foreign degree than a U.S. one, because when I browse faculty pages at most U.S. schools, a good number of professors seem to have foreign graduate degrees (granted, these profs were not American to begin with, but....). Anecdotally, I know of many Canadian profs who teach at U.S. schools.

Having said that, graduate funding at McGill is not as good as it ought to be, despite being a first tier research institution. McGill professors are the richest in the country yet only a limited portion of their funds are used to fund grad students (I wonder why).

So let me point the submitter to some Canadian schools that will *guarantee* graduate funding to anyone who can get into some of their programs (doesn't matter if you're Canadian or not). As far as I can tell, the University of Toronto funds every student accepted.... Info here. University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario, McMaster University funds all students accepted to selected programs.

In my experience, U.S. schools often don't like to fund Masters students because M.S. programs are too short for them to extract any useful research out of the students (projects funded by research grants usually take years). They prefer to fund Ph.D. students.

But in Canada, M.S. students have an almost equal chance of getting funding.

Anyway, as some other poster said, there will be insular schools and outward-looking schools. The United States is a big and diverse country - one cannot really generalize.

(P.S. but sometimes it is tempting... for instance, I was watching Letterman last night, and David Letterman was talking to a lady from Texas (this was on Stupid Pet Tricks). He asked her, "So if you drive west from Texas, you hit New Mexico, right?". She said yes. "What state is west of New Mexico?"... and she said "I don't know". And she's from Texas! I'm not American and even I know Arizona is west of New Mexico. But as I said, the U.S. is a big country... and there are all kinds out there.)

When was the tie function created? According to Perl history Perl wasn't released until December 18, 1987. These applications have priority to August 21, 1987, so Perl itself might not even qualify as prior art given the first public release date. It is also possible that the tie function wasn't even released with the first release of Perl.

diction can compute the Kincaid Formula, Automated Readability Index, the Coleman-Liau Formula and a few more indexes. It would be a simple matter to incorporate those sources into OO.

As soon as I read the earlier /. story about PlayFair, I went straight to SourceForge and downloaded a copy. It now sits at home in a (sadly) ever expanding directory named "samizdat", along with things like deCSS stuff, the Grey Album, and various other bits from Illegal Art. Some of those things are still available, but I have such little faith in the DCMA that I think private copies are warranted.

Then it's obvious that you don't go to a real geek school.

Actually, I go to an Engineering school... But i was talking about those going in Nursing School.... Just a short distance from where I go...

But as the song says: 'But they don't even speak to me 'cause I'm an Engineer'

Documentation is far and away the thing that sets Perl apart from other languages. There are some bad things you can say about Perl's documentation, but most of them are criticisms that you can't even begin to make of other programming languages because they simply aren't in the same ballpark.

I blame POD for this. POD is just a simple set of markup controls you can add to a plain text document to make it easy to translate it into other documentation and markup formats. It's so simple in fact that there's really no mental hurdles to sitting down and writting the docs for your program, module, language feature, etc., and so people do! Just about every peice of code uploaded to CPAN has a full suite of documentation for every module it provides for this reason. What's more, you can type "perldoc Foo" on any system with the "Foo" module installed and get a copy of that documentation ready at your fingertips.

I even use Pod at work. it's an easy format to teach to people, and what could be simpler than writing a simple text file documenting a procedure you want people to follow. Then it's automatically turned into HTML and added to our internal Web site. Would that the rest of my job was that easy...

You can be sure that Sony will in some way make the PS3 backwards compatible with the PS2, and likely even the PS1

I'm not so sure, if they do software emulation like you say then its a definate possibility. The reason the PS2 can play PS1 games is because the IO chip in the PS2 is the same chip used as the main CPU in the PS1.

Its mentioned here

is Poki Poker Online. There aren't that many rooms, but the interface Java applet is clean and compatible with Linux, OSX, and Win9x if you've got the right runtime package. The bots are quite competitive, and the playerbase fairly forthcoming with advice and commentary on precisely how bad your strategies, or lack thereof, are.