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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.'"
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
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."
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"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.