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

Re:Not true at all

[Pulzar]

Two players colluding in a game is a huge problem. Even a marginal advantage equals to a huge advantage played out over time.

That's only true if the players are so even in skill that they would be breaking even over a long period of time, and this little edge would push one of the ahead. In general, having a very small edge in flush draw situations (and other situations that provide even smaller edges), will not be enough to overcome the edge of being a better player. So, the better player might not win as much (or if the cheating player is the better one, he might win a little more), but over the long run, the skill will prevail -- because the decisions made in the situations where the other two cards make no difference have a much better impact on the final result.

So, you could say it's a problem, but a huge one -- I disagree. I'd say it's not even a significant one at this point.