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Researchers "Solve" Texas Hold'Em, Create Perfect Robotic Player
Jason Koebler writes The best limit Texas Hold'Em poker player in the world is a robot. Given enough hands, it will never, ever lose, regardless of what its opponent does or which cards it is dealt. Researchers at the University of Alberta essentially "brute forced" the game of limit poker, in which there are roughly 3 x 10^14 possible decisions. Cepheus runs through a massive table of all of these possible permutations of the game—the table itself is 11 terabytes of data—and decides what the best move is, regardless of opponent.
Wouldn't another robot which knows of all possible decisions of this particular robot be better that this "Perfect Robotic Player"?
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
In limit poker there is more often a correct play. The odds would dictate, in a large pot to call that last bet because it is only a fraction of the pot. As long as your pot odds are better than your card odds it is correct to call, even if you only have one or two outs. In no limit where you can adjust the size of your bet, the correct bet is to give your opponents worse pot odds then their card odds. No bot can ever master no limit, it's not a card game at all. it's a people game played with cards.
What happens if someone else creates an identicly perfect robotic player and joins the table? If, as the researches claim, winning limit Texas Hold'em is a directly solvable problem then anybody else who tries to solve the problem will come up with the exact same solution.
If these two robots played each other wouldn't the winner be determined by pure luck?
-rd