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Humans Can Still Out-Bluff Machines
Pcol writes "The New York Times reports that in a poker game this week between man and machine, a program called Polaris fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional poker players. Designing a poker playing algorithm is a different and more difficult challenge for software designers than chess and checkers because of uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player and difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors such as bluffing. The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move and a top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. Polaris build a series of "bots" that have differing personalities or styles of play, ranging from aggressive to passive. Researchers monitored the performance of three bots and then moved them in and out of the lineup like football players."
I think that it'll probably stay this way for a while - man beats machine, altho as been talked about before when someone got beat in chess by one. I can't remember the name of it, but I'm sure others know. I'll be impressed once computers can out-think human beings totally.
If you're playing cards in Hold'em, against decent players, you WILL lose.
Hold'em is all about betting - if, when, and how much. And THAT you determine by the behavior of your opponent. It's not a strategy game, but a psychological exercise.
Games with imperfect information. Very hard to design good AI to play these games, as the story says, tree search is not a win here. A game like stratego also has concepts that go beyond individual piece movement, i.e. you may want to group an few pieces together to make an attack, moving the unit (subject to input from the enemy) forwards. I have yet to see a good stratego game, there is one for $ called "The General". It can be defeated quite easily. I have found a stratego game in the past that could *not* be defeated! But, some sleuthing on my part (via saving the game and restoring it at key points) showed the sw was cheating by moving its pieces around to adjust to the threats(!). I have had an obsession with this style of AI but its such a daunting problem its hard to get a good handle on where to start to chip away at it. I suspect the polaris folks have been doing just this, the AI and methods they develop would be useful for other games I am sure.
H.
In any discussion of humans vs. computers, it is almost obligatory to mention that computers are really lousy at the game Go.
Not to say that this isn't interesting, but people and computers process information very differently and something things that are trivial for a computer (ie 38209138291/832903821938) are very hard for people and vice-versa.
I guess that I bring that up only because it seems that there is often a sense of "we people are still so much smarter than computers," which is largely just a bunch of BS. After all, as any programmer knows, the best computer program is only as smart as the people who wrote it. Certainly, it is interesting to study because it (maybe) helps us understand cognition a bit better, and it (certainly) helps us make computers do more interesting things. I just get sick of the sensationalism every time a human can "out-think" a computer.
So, that means a human player had to play against 4 other "players?"
So in a sense the computer wasn't really playing anyhow. I suspect that deciding which bots to move in and out is another skill that humans are better at than computers.
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excess heat coming off body
No. They shouldnt be allowed to observe anything a person cant. I cant get up in the middle of a poker game and attempt to stick a thermometer into my opponent's rear to see if he's lying. Why not just put a camera behind him and read his cards? How do you propose we detect sweat? Measuring skin resistance? You cant do that in a real game either.
I think a plain-jane camera would be allowed, but even then its pretty unfair. The human player has no face to look at to potentially figure out the bluff (or the tell).
Ideally, the computer would be represented by an actor who would impersonate a poker player, like feeling anxious when he's losing, trying to pull off a bluff, etc.
It would cost the house money to populate their tables with bots in a game like texas holdem. Rake is only payed by the person who won the pot (at Poker Stars at least).
A typical player sitting at a 6 player table can produce 80-100 hands an hour. Over the course of 24 hours a single player could play 2,160 hands if he took no breaks. If that player decided to play 4 tables instead of 1 (which is completely within the realm of normal) then he would be playing a total of 8,640 hands.
Let's say that player is playing on a table where the rake is always $3 when they see a flop (most sites don't rake you if no flop was seen in texas holdem). If you win 5% of the hands you play and only 30% of them saw a flop (everyone folded to your raise before the flop) that would be a grand total of 302 raked pots for $3 each = $906.
Instantly the house gains $906. Just because 1 guy played 8,640 hands. If that player were a bot they would have gotten $0, for a loss of $906.
If they loaded up 1,000 bots to fill tables you can quickly see how much they would lose if real players were sitting down instead of the bots.
One could imagine that a "psychological exercise" is still a strategy game, but with much wider priors in the statistics.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
Being that the CS folks that setup the computer were expecting a draw, I think they must have started with the assumption that a top level pro poker player knows the statistics of almost every situation (from experience and intuition) as well as a machine can calculate them. And the truth is they do - the best probably know what their hole cards and flop mean down to the first decimal point every single time it's worth thinking about.
So, then the play comes down to responding to how the other person is playing. And the edge goes to the one that can safely be unreadable/unpredictable/inconsistent.
Now, obviously if you can't figure out any of the statistics involved in a hand you will always get your ass handed to you in the long run by a player/machine that can do the most rudimentary calculation.
Getting diabetes AND salmonella would be a bad weekend.
Well the main point I was making was about computational complexity.
And I think your point is dead false, especially when it comes to televised poker, in which the blinds are always very large, and the stacks quite short, meaning that the correct move is almost always mathematically provable, if one had the inclination.
If one was allowed, one could sit at the table with software like SNG Analyzer, enter the tournament structure, and assuming the player was capable of making decent estimates of people's raise and fold ranges, they could play near optimally, just by knowing how opponents play pre-flop.
It seems almost like you agree with me, that the only reason it's exciting is because it is very simple, and all the chips are at risk on every hand. This is the opposite of complexity.
And FWIW, I am far more bothered by the moderators reaction to your post, than your post. It's not insightful. It's wrong.
I think the point is that you don't know if it is the 1 time you lose, or the 10 times you win, so you would go for the win since, 10 out of 11 times, you would win. Who cares if you lose that 1 time if you win the other 10 times. That's why you never lay them down since, statistically, you are 10 times more likely to win than lose.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
In a magazine profile, the writer played heads-up with Daniel for two hours. After the first half hour, Daniel was calling the writer's hole cards with astonishing accuracy.
You may not want to use the term psychology to describe this skill, but millions will disagree with you.
What was once true, is no longer so