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Poker Driving Artificial Intelligence Research
J-Hawker writes "The Canadian Press has a story about a University of Alberta team that is using Texas Hold-'em to study artificial intelligence. Poker seems to be a much more useful game for this research than chess. From the article: 'Poker has what are currently some of the biggest challenges to (artificial intelligence) systems, and uncertainty is the primary hurdle that we're facing,' said Michael Bowling, adding that the University of Alberta program was able to use its opponents' actions to infer certain things about their hands. 'The same techniques, the same principles that we're developing to build poker systems are the same principles that can be applied to many other problems. The nice thing about chess as a property of the game is what we call perfect information. You look at the board, you know where all the pieces are, you know whose turn it is — you have complete knowledge of the game,' he said. 'But in the real world, knowing everything is just so rare. Everything we do all day long is all about partial information. So poker's much more representative of what the real world's like, and in that sense it becomes a much harder problem.'"
Most good players don't actually "Bluff" in the sense that they are totally full of crap, and have no hand. Most bluffs are calculated risks based on the overall odds of "Improving" the hand, such as the case with four of a suit and two cards left to be turned over. In that case, the overall odds of hitting the flush are good enough to bet on (unless of course there is a pair showing on the board, which would indicate a possible full-house), even though the player has no "real" hand yet. Situations such as this can be quantified. Granted there are some real morons out there who will try to "bluff" with nothing, they are relatively rare and don't usually last long.
I'm not fat, just big boned...
Good poker players constantly semi-bluff and do continuation bets. They do plain bluffs in some situations too. Its all about reading your opponent- if I think an opponent will lay down a hand if he doesn't have a pair, I will always bet on the flop even with nothing- the odds favor him having nothing as well, and if he always lays down non-pairs I'll win more money by betting than I lose.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
What confuses me is how the poker openings differ. I would speculate that a program would be some heuristic relating the ratio of bluffing to "playing the odds." I have gambling friends that play poker all the time and they have these rules that they follow when they play initially against people. They say it's the best until you "know" the people you're playing. Once you can read them then you deviate from the rules. The real irony is that the most successful people I know adhere to a system until they learn someone's movements. Sounds to me like I would write an application that specializes in playing the odds until it recognizes a historical action that statistically reveals the player is bluffing/not bluffing.
You can tell you don't play much poker.
Part of what differentiates a pro player to an amatur player in poker, is the ability to "project an image". A pro player will purposefully *project* an image of a bluffer, or a tight player, so that they can exploit that image of themselves when they see fit in the game.
Thusly, it is very difficlt to get a "read" on a good poker player, because not only do you not know what cards they have, but you don't know how they would play for any two given cards, so you can't use their behaviour to prdict the cards they have.
In the end, the above description is what any decent player is aiming for while they play.
Because of this, a computer can have a hard time going beyond implied odds calulations in determining how to play a hand - and any pro ill tell you, implied odds are a good starting point, but they won't make you money in the long run.