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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".
They realize the only way to win is not to play?
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
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.
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
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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.
Any comp sci grad can write a "perfect" poker program that plays "optimally" with your definition of optimality and perfectionism, ie, ignoring bluffing. The trick to Poker, the reason why it is so appealing as an Artificial Intelligence benchmark is because it requires the AI to learn a particular players loosness/agressivness when they are likely bluffing etc. This is not only to try to determine what the other players have, but also to try to bluff to the other players what the AI has.
The truly optimum poker player will learn what the opponents have by observing their betting patterns over the course of many hands and learning their particular tendencies.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
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)
This is a very ignorant view of what optimal play means. The standard example is Rock-Paper-Scissors (RoShamBo). If I play perfectly randomly, and I tell you that I am going to play perfectly randomly, there is exactly nothing you can do to beat me in the long run. This concept can be extended to poker (and all two player zero-sum games). For a computer to play truely optimal means that it can give you its exact strategy before the match and you still won't be able to beat it. A mathematically optimal play is still the same regardless of what the opponent has. Truely optimal play hides the true nature of the hidden cards from being able to be predicted by the opponent. If, by "mathematically optimum poker", you mean immediate pot odds, then you are right. Its easily beatable, however that is certainly not what mathematically optimal poker is. I suggest reading "The Mathematics of Poker" (http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Poker-Bill-Chen/dp/1886070253), it will absolutely change your mind into how mathematics can be used.
One intelligent comment on this thread. We can model that with a Poisson distribution.
What was your tell? Translating "mathematically optimum poker" to "immediate pot odds". Optimum? Which optimum? You mean there's more than one? I fold.
OK, what you say is right, but it applies to two-person, zero-sum games. In multi-player games, no strategy is immune to collusion.
Let's refer to optimum play from the conventional game-theoretic context as the unbeatable strategy. Such a two person, zero-sum game such a strategy exists.
It's not necessarily an easy computation. It's a randomized strategy which can be computed before-hand. The U of A people are better are performing this computation.
Even so, they had to simplify the betting structure to make the problem tractable. This is the reason they chose Limit Hold'em. Fewer betting states, smaller game tree, exponentially faster solution time.
There is no particular challenge to No Limit, if the number of allowable betting states were similarly constricted. I think it would be hard to sufficiently constrict this, because strategy would vary as a function of chip stack for both competitors. Maybe it could be roughly interpolated.
As far as randomized play is concerned, the unbeatable strategy tends to be far more randomized than most humans. One expert who played against the U of A system a while back said that his first session was a nightmare until he learned that he couldn't bluff the computer out. The computer had a tendency to call aggressive betting. It expected highly randomized bids based on its own bidding structure, so didn't make a strong inference of strength when confronted by the behaviour.
What few seem to understand is that the unbeatable solution is entirely unlike poker. The unbeatable solution rarely wins. The unbeatable solution will often draw against strategies with glaring weaknesses. It won't ever be beaten, but it also won't maximize advantage of opponent's weaknesses.
Why not? Because it's impossible to take advantage of the weakness in an opponent without exposing yourself to a counter-measure where you would lose (you must stray from the unbeatable path). When you take advantage of a weak opponent, you do it on faith that the opponent is too dumb to spring the optimal counter-measure to your strategic adaptation.
The theory that U of A employs has far less to say about exploiting the weaknesses of your adversary. To do so requires exposing a weakness in your own strategy. How does the algorithm judge whether the exposed weakness is acceptable? Even poor human players can spot certain kinds of weaknesses quickly. There are other weaknesses an expert might not immediately spot. How does the program know which weaknesses are a risk against which players? It doesn't fall out of game theory, it's a matter of human cognition and psychology, and our model for this is far from complete.
One thing we need to include in this model is the incredible difficulty in explaining to most humans that winning in poker and not losing in poker are entirely different enterprises, with entirely different theoretical foundations. Commander Data has trouble assimilating that fact. 100 trillion brain cells and most of us can't reliably multiply a pair of two digit numbers. If computers had invented humans as part of a BI program (biological intelligence), humans would have been tossed aside as barely having achieved perfect game play at Tic-Tac-Toe. What use is 100 trillion brain cells that can't reliably compute a 15% tip after a heavy lunch? Many computers would like to know.
As computers became better at chess, chess as a human enterprise was somewhat devalued. Few of us wish to put the work into it that the modern theory requires.
I fear the same will soon happen with poker. As the elements of the unbeatable strategy become better known, the relatively inexperienced players can hunker down and not lose much money. They won't be able to win, either, because t
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.