Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The AI is "able to use its opponents' actions to infer certain things about their hands"
While it may seem logical to use the actions of people playing to determine something about their hands, in reality people do not play logically. My uncle has been playing spades for probably better than 30 years, yet I have yet in my relatively limited 10+ years of playing to determine any rational for how he plays. Basically, he really sucks at spades. No matter how "Intelligent" artifical or otherwise I manage to code a game, it can't reason out the reasoning behind a non-logical person.
Good quote I say somewhere: Artifical intelligence is no match for natural stupidity!
And this holds true for more than card game AI. It will not be too long until AI could reasonably drive around and get from point A to point B safely. But it will be a damn long time before it can do it if it has to share the road with people driving as well!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I agree with you in part. Poker is a game of odds with lots of unknowns. It is quite easy to calculate the odds based on what limited information you have which is what the poker TV shows do to simplify things for viewers. But like you said, your buddies use more advanced practices against known players. I would love to see some advanced biometric lie detector used as part of the AI platform to determine the probability of a bluff and factor that into its thinking.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Also, why ensure that no one computer got lucky? Isn't that the point of playing several thousand hands of limit poker, to eliminate the effect of luck in the study? If it's necessary to normalize all the hands received by the players, then something else is wrong with the study. I'd like to see if the results differed, and how, when the hand repetition is removed.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
In Euchre, knowing your partner's cards is a *huge* advantage... In poker, knowing the cards on one other player at the table gives you such a minute advantage that it's irrelevant in almost all practical cases.
Sure, if all of the players at the table except for you are sharing their cards, and are not required to conceal it (i.e. they can openly collude in their betting patterns against you), then they have a big advantage. But, that's, again, not very realistic.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
If someone had a bot that could successfully beat online poker, why would they sell it?
"Computers aren't particularly good at learning, for example, or reasoning by analogy"
Computers aren't good at retaining knowledge and recognizing patterns? That's news to me... this statement is obviously made by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about...
A very strong and useful technique in AI is to create learning algorithms. Some of these, such as reinforcement learning, are actually quite effective. Using something like Monte Carlo methods to give it a randomness factor simulates human learning, and computers don't forget what they are taught. The difficulty with learning isn't that computers can't do it... it's being able to define an effective set of state-action pairs for the computer to learn upon.
I spent time researching natural language processing, sometimes using AI techniques that did exactly what this person claims computers aren't good at: reasoning by analogy. One method involved building a knowledge base which generalized input so that patterns can be found and the grammar could be recovered. The weakness in the system wasn't reasoning by analogy, in fact I'd say computers are much better at that than people. It was rather a lack of a real world model which allowed for a wider array of perception.
The reason this game is difficult is not based on a computer's inability to solve problems, rather that there are so many possibilities that we cannot effectively design algorithms that the can be put to use. This isn't even news, the same has been said about the game of Go for the longest time.
I think a more accurate statement for this person to make would've been: "The overwhelming complexity of poker makes it a difficult game to define in a way for a computer to be able to play effectively."
--
"A man is asked if he is wise or not. He replies that he is otherwise" ~Mao Zedong
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
The operative word there is "profit". Profit is the motive - vice is merely the easiest way to achieve it.
AI as a field is still very hot. The difference is that the goals have changed and the field has fractured into smaller sub-fields. The goal of a truly "human intelligence" doesn't seem feasible in any near term scenario. Fields such as statistical learning theory, natural language processing, computer vision, genetic algorithms, and many more yielded very interesting results.
You only know your odds if you know exactly what every opponent has... and that's where simple heuristics fail miserably.
Completely untrue; you clearly don't understand the purpose of "odds" and probability. The entire purpose of "computing odds" is to deal with situations where you don't have all the information. If you had all the information, you wouldn't be "computing odds", you'd just know.
It is a simple matter of math to compute odds based on knowing what you have, and not knowing anything else. You can't compute the odds they show you on the TV when they know all the hands on the table, but the human gamblers don't get those odds either.
It isn't a simple matter of math to know what to do with those odds, and that's the problem. Computing the odds is a pretty straightforward task, though.
So, in a nutshell, you're claiming that AI players have special problems because they can't compute odds that the human players can't compute either. If anything, it's easier for bots because they can run 100%-accurate real math in the blink of an eye, where a human will probably be using an approximation.