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Poker Program Battles Humans In Vegas
Bridger writes "Poker software called Polaris will play a rematch against human players during the 2008 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
Developed by an artificial intelligence group at the University of Alberta in Canada, Polaris will be pitted against several professionals at the Rio Hotel between July 3rd and 6th. 'It's possible, given enough computing power, for computers to play "perfectly," where over a long enough match, the program cannot lose money,"' said associate professor Michael Bowling.'"
When it's bluffing, it blinks twice.
I'd love to see one of the guys slick at handleing cards, slip a couple extra aces into the deck, or the like. Would the program adapt? Draw a laser and call him a no good sack of mostly water?
I Need someone to rebuild a Digitech Digital Delay pedal for me....for me...for me...for me.
If they want to correctly display the advanced AI "poker face": :|
Only to find out it's Wii tennis, a very small subset of "tennis"
The statements made regarding this subject apply only to the subset of poker being played, seven-card limit Texas Hold'em.
Poker is a zero sum game. Pit two of these 'perfect' players against each other, and one of them will lose money.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
professional poker is a psychological game. Unless the computer has the feeling of anxiety it will have an edge.
What I find impressive is the fact it lost in the past. It would also be interesting to see what it can do with some sort of lie detector software.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
"It's possible, given enough computing power, for computers to play "perfectly," where over a long enough match, the program cannot lose money,"
So what happens when you pit two of these against each other?
You can't lose what you don't put in the middle. But you can't win much either.
professional poker is a psychological game. Unless the computer has the feeling of anxiety it will have an edge.
Poke is almost entirely a game of skill, not chance, at professional levels. The average dufus at his weekend poker game will play for luck. Professionals play the other players. A computer has no tells, and can't read them in a human player. The computer therefore has a distince edge against the amateur, and a distinct disadvantage against the pro.
What I find impressive is the fact it lost in the past. It would also be interesting to see what it can do with some sort of lie detector software.
The only lie detector that has any hope of working - as you should know, if you read /. - is a professional poker player.
i don't believe it. he's bluffing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's not a terribly difficult calculation to know if a bet has sufficient pot odds. Playing against imperfect players a bot is virtually garaunteed to make money.
Against professionals though it might have trouble winning, since pros also calculate pot odds more or less perfectly, but can change their play to throw off the computer. It's sort of akin to how a chess master might beat a computer.
Because Chess is a game of complete information, and is largely a matter of brute forcing out the best move from tons of choices. Poker is a game of incomplete information (You do not know your opponents hand), as the decisions your opponent will make influence what the "correct" decision for you to make is. Chess was a matter of computing power, whereas poker is a matter of implementing game theory abilities in the AI.
Because as they've said at their page poker has a lot more applications to the real world later. this is all about making intelligent decisions with imperfect information. Chess can simply be brute forced eventually, just like checkers was.
http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/man-machine/
First match was a draw.
and played with infinite money
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Most 100%+ slots I've seen, in Vegas, stipulate that you only get 100% of your money back, "with perfect play". Which would mean the majority of people would still loose plenty of money. Besides, even if you did double your money on a 106% slot you'd probably blow it all on craps five seconds later anyway.
If the machine "loses" (assuming 100% utilization) less than $4/hour on average, they almost certainly come out ahead on amenities/drinks; family members and friends playing other games; people getting bored of the low-payoff slots and losing money on other games; etc. Slots are there partly to keep "non-gamblers" busy pulling a lever, while their acquaintances piss away larger sums.
Once the machine gives away around minimum wage or higher, you might start getting crazies and obsessives working it.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I was hoping this wouldn't have to be said, but playing Poker isn't gambling if you play it properly. The house takes a small cut from each hand which reduces your winnings by a proportionally small amount, but otherwise it's like anything else requiring skill - over time, the best player will always win more money, and the worst player (skill-wise) will lose the most money.
Playing perfectly = keeping 100% of your money in your wallet
That is not akin to how a chess master beats a computer. In chess there is no bluffing and no chance.
100%+ "pure" slot games aren't exactly common (because as you say, they will invariably lose you money). What is very common is 100%+ return poker machines or games with similar levels of user input, where the machines pay out more than 100% if you play 'perfectly', forever. Of course perfect play is often unintuitive and involves things like taking the safe bet rather than higher payout options - not something most people in Vegas are renowned for.
I'm not sure why anyone thinks this is such a feat. In LIMIT hold'em, bluffing, psychological aspects, and implied odds are diminished to the point of meaning next to nothing. It is almost a purely computational game. So, yes, a computer can play technically "perfect".
There are already poker "bots" out there that will play pretty much perfectly when it comes to Limit Hold'em. I'm not sure why this is so different.
I want to see this team of academics write some code that will beat a human at *No-Limit* Hold'em. Or maybe *Pot-Limit* Omaha. NEVER going to happen.
I don't care how well such a program is coded... it will absolutely buckle under the pressure of a professional who constantly bets half his stack on nothing. The machine would turn into a professional folding station that only plays AA, KK, or AK. Guess what? That strategy isn't winning any games or any period of time in a no-limit or pot-limit world.
The online poker houses don't ever "win" because they're not in the game. They're just the host, and they make money by taking percentage of the pot for each game.
It's for this reason they have an interest in making sure the games are fair. If there was ever reason to suspect the games were weighted or unfair everybody would leave to another host.
They are way too busy (literally) raking in the dough to cheat. The big online poker sites go through a lot of trouble to keep their reputation clean.
For people who play professionally, or even amateurs who play often over several years, the chance aspect of the game disappears as the card distribution converges, and skill is all that is left to decide the winnings.
Over a career playing poker, there's just about the same chance/skill ratio as there is in chess.
Poker sites are not full of bots. The one I play at is full of terrible players who enjoy throwing their money away.
/.
No bot plays perfect poker. I'm sure that no bot will be perfect for a very, very long time (way beyond my lifetime). The mathematics behind poker is incredibly complex. A good book about it is the mathematics of poker by Bill Chen and Jerrod Ankenman. From reading your post it seems to me that you have a very little idea about the problems with solving poker and even how to play poker. You can't just call when you have the odds and fold when you don't. It just doesn't work that way - that strategy is easily exploited. I'm also not sure why you were modded +5 Insightful... I guess there aren't many poker players here at
AK? That's Called an Anna Kournikova...She looks good, but never wins ;-)
The chance/skill ratio in chess is 0, because there's no chance in chess. I don't understand how you can say that.
No offense, but you obviously don't understand poker very well. For example, unless the betting structure is very restrictive (e.g. heads up game with 2x BB stacks) a bot could not possibly play "statistically perfect poker" (an erroneous statement in itself) because it's a game of incomplete information. Perfect poker is only possible when you can see everyone's hole cards. Computers do not have any intrinsic edge in this regard.
You are fundamentally mis-understanding the importance of variance. Try to think of it in the REALLY big picture of the long term. If I offer you a game you spin a wheel where the bet is $1000, and 999 out of 1000 times you will lose everything, and 1 time out of 1000 you will get paid $100,001 dollars, my game is now paying out OVER 100%. Now this is a simplified example, but almost NOBODY is willing to take those swings of variance for such a ridiculously small edge. The casino has almost unlimited amounts of money, and can ALWAYS bear the swings. This is also besides the point that there are MAYBE only a handful of them on the casino floor and they are always filled in the WAY back of the casino, ensuring that for giving up a tiny edge, hundreds of gamblers will come in and try, and give up.
Someone will *have* to be the loser.
You're assuming the game actually ends. But we know that computers are prone to infinite loops :-p.
The Pros will still win, because the Pros have more information than the computer, if the computer is always playing optimally.
That's what makes the Pros pros. People who play mathematically optimum poker lose, because they are ignoring the information that is important: What cards does the opponent have?
In fact, I'd wager (hah!) that a computer playing mathematically optimum poker is at a disadvantage, as it makes it much easier for a Pro to determine what cards the computer has.
paintball
If I was playing a computer on the first hand I would go ALL in (and do it blind). ...program would hopefully calculate my SIZE_OF_BALLS() variable as an out of bounds condition and give up. If that didn't work at least I'd be done and could go back to drinkin' in the casino bar.
And if you leak your source code, anyone who knows they're playing against your bot will have a huge advantage.
No. Knowing the source code of an ideal poker program would do you no good. You can't win against an agent following the Nash equilibrium for a game. He's going to be choosing from a library of strategies such that for every complete game, whatever strategy you choose, the expected value of the game is zero.
Naturally such an ideal program is hard to write, but conceptually it's very simple - poker is equivalent to any other zero sum game.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Of course perfect play is often unintuitive and involves things like taking the safe bet rather than higher payout options - not something most people in Vegas are renowned for.
its actually completely the opposite for most video poker games, such as throwing away a made flush (already a winner) that is almost a straight/royal flush --an example would be like KQJT2 all of clubs, the correct play is to give up the guaranteed win of a flush, and draw for the jackpot hands (royal and straight flush)
I think it's more likely that casinos have 0% slots.
Casino machines are heavily regulated. Instead, the gambling industry is searching for other ways to screw their clients: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/16/gambling_science/
Probability has very much to do with potential strategies.
A more limited form of this is blackjack - although a machine doesn't know exactly what cards are going to come up, and doesn't know exactly what cards its opponents has, by using probabilities over the long-term, it can still beat the house.
Also, as cards in the deck are used up & the machine learns more about what cards have been used, it can make more precise calculations about what cards other people have or what might be coming up in the draw, and adjust its strategies accordingly.
This is stuff that the pros do all the time in their heads, and which the pros use to decide THEIR strategies, except that a machine will be able to calculate those probabilities perfectly, without getting tired and without making any mistakes. If a pro could do that, it would give him/her a pretty decent advantage - assuming that they had a large repertoire of strategies that they could use to capitalize on their knowledge.
Which brings us back to the main weakness of the machine - the machine will only have the repertoire that was programmed into it by its creators (or that it can figure out by heuristics/exhaustive search), and if it is mindless about applying those techniques, or only has a very limited set of techniques available to it, then a pro who figures out its patterns can take advantage of that (just like in chess).
It would also be very difficult for a machine to make judgements about its opponent's mental state (unless the eggheads make some sort of breakthrough on categorizing mental states through facial recognition).
Neither of these weaknesses have anything to do with perfect probability calculations being very useful, however.
The chance/skill ratio in chess is 0, because there's no chance in chess. I don't understand how you can say that.
There are some elements of chance in chess since players are better prepared for some openings then others. All grandmasters have some novel lines they have developed that they are ready to spring upon their opponent if given the chance and the game is critical enough to reveal it. Since they are on the clock, there is not much time to ponder a response to something that has been worked out over months or years.
How about Global Thermonuclear War?
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
This is ridiculus. If there are no bots in **online poker**, the only reason for this is that the hosts are too good at detecting them!
**Online poker** is not real poker. I have been myself playing like a bot would do, with a sheet of paper infront of me, with simple instructions like "if you are xx seat, have cards xy, others did that, so you do this". I did make some profit, but i don't really like the game at all, seeing that it is just that simple. Making a bit of profit in online poker is not about *perfect* play, it is only about beating the newbies. Even the most trivial poker bot can win online if it just can go by undetected.
Sure, people can and will exploit you with that type of play and it will never work in games with higher wages, but this is all the more reason to belive there have to be bots. A bot can simply track all players it plays against and leave tables when there is someone exploiting them. There are thousand of tables and millions of players, all you have to do is avoid those who know you. At the same time a bot can play all day and night on any number of tables.
I bet there are alot bots already, undetected and unpublished, generation a steady stream of money for those who wrote them and are not afraid of fraud charges ... Only an idiot would publish such a bot and draw attention from the host. And neither would the poker hosts confirm the existance of a bot, since they absolutely depend on the illusion that the game is fair.
Okay. You can have the first move.
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