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$100,000 Poker Bot Tournament
Costa Galanis writes "The LA Times is reporting that a poker tournament will be held where engineers will be able to pit their automatic poker-playing programs against each other in a tournament similar to the upcoming World Series of Poker main event, with a 100,000 dollar cash prize for the winning program. The article mentions how the recent rise in popularity of poker has encouraged many to try and create the poker equivalent of chess' Big Blue, the chess playing computer program that defeated the world's top chess player in a widely publicized event, and also talks about how many engineers also are trying to make bots that are good enough to play and beat human players for money in online casinos."
Any poker player will tell you bluffing is where it's at. Without bluffing you play the odds and it just becomes a simple game of chance. The bluffing algorithms are were the interesting work will be.
The only thing the house gets in poker is table fees or tournament fees.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
I'm going to submit a modded version of Eliza. It will win by confusing the other bots into submission! :) :P
"Cause the bot always wins. You play long enough, never change the stakes, the bot takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, and then you take the bot." - Danny Ocean
The only thing the house gets in poker is table fees or tournament fees.
And by that, you mean the house definitely wins every time.
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Microsoft Poker on Windows 3.1. Just make a huge bet and all the computers Fold :P
1. Let openents Place you their bets.
2. Place a stupidly huge bet.
3. They fold.
4. Profit!
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The chess machine is Deep Blue. It was created by IBM (AKA Big Blue).
Perhaps the winning program could be reconfigured to create business plans?
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Whenever my poker bot goes "all in", my mudd bot somehow gets the idea that it's time to start slaying all of the other players.
I think what is required here is clear and concise rules on what kind of weaponry the bots get to wield.
Also, I don't think bots should get to wear sunglasses.
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Africus aut Europaeus?
Have you ever played poker?
Have you ever watched poker on TV? Did you notice that the same few people seem to be at the final table a disproportional percentage of the time. It's because although the cards themselves are random, the game is not. Every bet and every action is a subtle piece of a conversation about your perceived strength of your own hand versus your perceived strengths of your opponents.
There's a lot of skill. It's not simply high card wins. The really good poker players willoften win without the best hands, because they know when their opponents are weak and will be willing to give up on a pot.
So, yeah, a poker bot could replicate this.
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Anyone who thinks the best poker stategies are dictated by statistics has no idea how to play poker. That won't make much of a poker playing strategy. The trick is representing stength and guessing what kind of hand your opponent has despite what they are representing.
Against real players the primary way of determining this is through the unconscious betting patterns almost every player has. Bots with some AI could do well at this. Bots against other bots is potentially an even more difficult problem.
What I fail to see is why anyone who had a well functioning bot would enter this kind of contest. There is far more money to be made without getting yourself the undue notoriety of this sort of success.
The "catch" is that unlike house games, the casino is only in the business of taking a percentage of the winnings in poker, known as the rake. In poker, since you are playing against your peers, if you are able to achieve a winning percentage greater than the house rake (commonly around 5-10%), then you are still a profitable poker player.
In the poker world, the common standard for a profitable, solid player is to earn two big bets per hour, which covers both the casino rake and tip. In a $3/$6 texas hold'em limit game for example, the big bet is $6, which equals a $12/hr wage for a solid player. Online, where you not only do not have to pay a tip to the dealer, but also generally pay a lower rake and play about 150% more hands per hour than in a brick and mortar casino, it's very well possible to win nearly twice what you would by playing online.
Thus, the only "catch" here is that by creating a successful poker bot that can play as well as a solid human, it may very well upheave the online poker industry as a whole. After all, if you could spawn near unlimited instances of an application that could pull in a meager $2/hr playing the $0.50/$1 low limit tables, that still means an insane amount of money. Whether or not it's legal.. that's another issue.
What would a computer program do with $100,000? Build a cluster to run itself on?
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Don't let the posters who say "just enumerate all possibilities" fool you.
The hardest part of playing poker is "reading" your opponents' hands -- learning how they tend to play, and inferring what cards they are likely to hold, whether they are bluffing or slow-playing, etc.
It may be easy to read a poker bot's style of play, but reading good human players is extremely difficult. So even if a certain bot crushes the competition in this tournament, it may not do so well against humans.
"I for one welcome our new poker playing robot overlords..."
SHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP!!!!!!"
Sorry, man. I promised myself I'd do that after I had heard that joke for the millionth time.
"Derp de derp."
As someone else pointed out, the main key to how successful bots will become in poker is the algorithms that conclude if a hand is "bet worthy". Obviously probability is easy for a bot to calculate; my high school students calculate card hand odds in my statistics class for homework. You can go even further by calculating rudimentary risk-reward odds to determine if the potential cash payoff for this current pot, combined with the probability you have for making your hand, combined with the probability the flop gives your opponents better hands than your own, etc.
The key, clearly, is the way your program "behaves" in response to opponent betting. You could code a program that only plays based on the probability of achieving a winning hand in a statistical sense. (IE, if my pocket has a 75% chance of becoming a hand that will beat 65% of all possible hands, then play it regardless) That wouldn't obviously play that well, since the bot won't consider opponent betting. However, if your bot regards opponent betting, it will easily become susceptible to power bluffing if the algorithm doesn't guard against it. (Hence, you have routines like poorly written cell phone games where you just have to come out of the blocks betting like mad and you'll 90% of the time bluff the bot out of the hand)
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more ingenious bots would be a medley of pure probability, observed opponent behavior (for trend matching with a fixed opponent), and a database of "real life" situations. If I were to design a bot for poker, and had the resources, I'd be sorely tempted to first host an online poker website and take a ton of samples from actual, online play. You have the advantage (right now, at least) of being able to record everyone's exact hands (at every stage of the hand) as well as everyone's betting. You could distill that into a form of database where you could try and match a bot's hand to a pre-existing condition case, and determine, along with your other ranking criteria, what a human player once did with that same hand, and whether that player won or not.
Londovir I could see bots taking over after awhile, but it's going to take some time...and even then, it should be entertaining to watch programmers trying to tweak their bot to beat another bot, sometimes without even knowing they are going up against another bot.
Londovir
One approach to this is to assume that the other players are markov processes with unknown internal states (sorry for the PDF) . Gathering enough data (and probing the opponents with various betting strategies) helps estimate the internal patterns of the opponents. Humans are terrible at creating random patterns needed for perfect playing strategies. This approach can be used, for example, to create a hard-to-beat paper-rock-scissors game that quickly found the non-random patterns in human players.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I did a little bit of work recently at UofA with the poker group.
p ublications.html
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/
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.
"Recursive bipartite matching"- try it!
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 wonder if this will encourage programmers to actually intentionally obfuscate their code.
Case in point, one thing that some people think is worth doing in the first few rounds of poker is to intentionally lose or call as many hands as you can, just to determine your opponents' betting methods and/or tells. Could something similar be done with programs? For instance, measuring the number of clock ticks that an opponent takes to analyze a given hand. If identical flops show up in subsequent rounds, and identical intervals lead to identical bets, is it possible that you've figured out how your opponent likes to bet? Furthermore, would it be worthwhile to throw in an empty do() while loop of random length in order to throw off such attempts? But how about betting patterns themselves?
This is one thing I've always thought was missing in creating AI. It's not so much about coming up with "perfect" AI because so long as it follows a set pattern, it'll never be perfect. If it's consistent, either you'll figure out how to beat it, or you'll give up in frustration because you know you can never beat it. But create multiple different AIs that follow basic tactics, and then mix them up, there's the challenge.
The Tournament will begin at 9:00 AM, and the grand prize will be presented at 9:03 AM.
And likewise, any poker player who thinks poker is only about representing false strength and putting your opponent on a hand has no idea how to play poker. The real trick is a balanced approach. The best poker players are great at both reading hands and psychological warfare, but you had also better believe they know exactly what odds the pot is offering and whether finishing a draw is a positive or negative play.
If you disagree, you're more than welcome to join our weekly game.
It may be that current bots can beat some of the worse human players, but it's not clear how many of the human players are that bad, and it's not clear how good the companies that run the servers are at detecting bot behavior.
One thing I'm still wondering about is human-human collusion. It's a big concern in breathe-the-same-air games between humans who don't know each other. Not sure about online poker, however -- do you get thrown in a table with randomly chosen players, none of whom you're likely to know? What about collusion between bots? E.g., you could be the only player at the table, not realizing you're playing against 6 bots, each of which knows what cards the others have.
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The point of bluffing is to convince the other players that you ARE bluffing when you've actually got a good hand. Then you can milk them for all they've got. If you're bluffing a low hand, you should be prepared to lose. In fact, you should be expecting it.
There's a 'rule' in texas hold'em: If the other players are playing loose, you play tight. If the other players are playing tight, you find another table. Some games really can't be bluffed.
And I want to clear this up: an indivual game is still a game of chance. A bunch of games in aggregate have some theory to use.
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Here's a list of the things that a poker playing robot needs to know:
1. When to hold 'em
2. When to fold 'em
3. When to walk away
4. When to run
5. Never count your money: When you're sitting at the table, there'll be time enough for counting, when the dealings done.
Pssh. You're too young. Just wait till you're asked to take the oath for when you hear it for the billionth time.
AI AI CTHULHU FTHAGN!
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"Qua!?"
You try to say that right when you're in non-euclidea- - Oh my God the tentacle came out of WHE-
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man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
The hard part in cashing in from poker bots online (which must exist somewhere, writing a statistically playing bot that just waits for nuts isn't that hard, and lousy players will fork over money to this thing) is evading detection.
If you just simply spawn 1000 bots, as easy as that seems, you'll be detected easily, and your online assets siezed. At the very least you'd need 100 or more IP's, and probably some variance in reaction times, mouse movements, etc.
that's the difficult part, because online casinos have alot of money to lose if players get spooked by the fear of bots. So they'll be trying *hard* to detect you.
I agree it'd be not-hard to code a bot that made 1BB/100 by playing tight. But unless you sit this thing down at 50/100 or higher you're not making much money from it. You'd need a small army of such bots, and as parent says this would be hard to hide. The alternative would be a bot that could make 5+ BB/100 at, say 5/10 and 10/20 tables .. I suspect this would be a very advanced machine. But it is theoretically possible.
Remember that one reason Big Blue beat Kasparov is that the human's previous games were all available for analysis by the computer. It had been *programmed to *beat *Kasparov.
A computer making serious cash against an ever-changing field of unknown quantities in a casino would require actual intelligence. The strategic environment is MUCH more dynamic in poker.
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