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.'"

Comments

Straight Forward Evaluation

[eldavojohn]

Poker seems to be a much more useful game for this research than chess.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Poker has the advantage of always being able to simply evaluate your chip count. Chess doesn't. You can't enumerate chess games through the entire gamespace so the initial opening moves are based on libraries or heuristics. In response to the machine not knowing all aspects of the "game space," I thought that there were a lot of developments in the field that allowed these to be accounted for. What ever happened to good old Trial and Error or Fuzzy Systems? Aren't these viable strategies when playing poker?

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.

Simply put, unless you knew someone's reputation as being a bluffer, you would play the opening hand always the same way. Aren't we forced to program the "AI" of the poker software as being this simple heuristic? Will programs ever be able to "read" players intelligently or will they rely on Markov models & statistics they develop from playing against the same human over and over?

Most unfortunate is the fact that the primary reason my friends gamble is they don't experience the same kind of rush while playing other games as they do with poker because it's more social than other games. If we program applications to beat humans, where does the "social aspect" of the game go?

Even more interesting is the network of poker bots that are set up and running some of the web sites that host poker players. Imagine sitting down at a table of five with four of the other seats taken. Now imagine that these aren't humans but instead bots on four different IP addresses that are sharing card information over an IP connection so that they can leverage odds over you and stop themselves from making stupid mistakes (i.e. they share a card on the table for a pair but really need three of a kind to pose a threat). There's a reason why the percentages fluctuate on TV when cards are revealed whether they be in the flop or in another player's hand.

Re:Straight Forward Evaluation

[bdonalds]

Now imagine that these aren't humans but instead bots on four different IP addresses that are sharing card information over an IP connection so that they can leverage odds over you and stop themselves from making stupid mistakes

Just to address a small part of your post- Bots Schmots! This is a problem already with humans. I used to like to play Euchre and the like online, but too many times it became obvious my opponents were communicating to each other and ruined the fun.

Re:Straight Forward Evaluation

[Propagandhi]

Aren't we forced to program the "AI" of the poker software as being this simple heuristic? Will programs ever be able to "read" players intelligently or will they rely on Markov models & statistics they develop from playing against the same human over and over?

Playing poker with 100% consistency is no way to be an excellent poker player. It's easy to make a bot that follows a set of statistics which give it a good chance to win regardless of how their opponent ha played in the past, but if the bot takes into account the player's past actions then it can improve its chances of success. Taking into account the opponent's aggressiveness becomes especially important late in a tournament style match (when other players have been eliminated), most bots aren't designed to play in these situations (hence why you don't see many bots in tournaments, playing instead at the normal tables).

The bot would, ideally, be as good as a very observant player, noting those who bluff and those who don't. Obviously noting 1 or 2 bluffs or non-bluffs would not be enough to make a decision, but over the course of a long tournament, or even better a poker playing career, this information would become very useful. The bot would learn its opponents, and this is what makes it an interesting problem.

Even more interesting is the network of poker bots that are set up and running some of the web sites that host poker players.

I'd argue that cheating at online poker isn't very interesting at all. Humans can do the exact same thing, and online poker companies monitor game's to ensure that there isn't an uncommonly high percentage of people in the same area playing any game. Obviously it might be easier to distribute the bots across the country, but I think it's still more likely (today) to run into actual players grifting you in this manner.

There's a reason why the percentages fluctuate on TV when cards are revealed whether they be in the flop or in another player's hand.

Quantum physics, right? You can accurately determine the odds of winning, or the cards in hand, but not both at the same time? Swear I read something about this somewhere.

Re:Straight Forward Evaluation

[rcs1000]

Two things:

(1) Knowing the cards of the other players is a small, but significant, advantage. Say you've got two hearts, and your three buddies have a heart each. Well, you're chance of getting another three hearts on the table are significantly affected. (Likewise, if they have none, it increases the chance you'll want to stay in and catch the flop.)

(2) Much more serious, though, is collusion in betting. You and your buddy can conspire to raise the pot *as much as you like*. In a fixed raise game, this is an enormous advantage. Another player cannot just "call" and see the next card, as there will always be a player still to call who can reraise.

Personally, though, I love bots. I'm happy to play them all day long. (So long as they're not colluding, of course...)

Cheers,

Robert

Already bots playing

[slapyslapslap]

There are already bots playing against unsuspecting people at the online casinos. I'm not sure how much AI is involved, but apparently they play better than most humans.

Computer Go

[dahl_ag]

While it probably doesn't have nearly the financial motivation that poker does, the AI behind Computer Go also represents a huge challenge. The rules of Go are very simple, but it is impossible to 'solve' using brute-force techniques like you might use with something like chess.