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: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:Bluffing

[AuMatar]

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.

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.