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In New AI Benchmark, Computer Takes On Four Top Professional Poker Players
HughPickens.com writes: Stephen Jordan reports at the National Monitor that four of the world's greatest poker players are going into battle against a computer program that researchers are calling Claudico in the "Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence" competition at Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. Claudico, the first machine program to play heads-up no-limit Texas Hold'em against top human players, will play nearly 20,000 hands with each human poker player over the next two weeks. "Poker is now a benchmark for artificial intelligence research, just as chess once was. It's a game of exceeding complexity that requires a machine to make decisions based on incomplete and often misleading information, thanks to bluffing, slow play and other decoys," says Tuomas Sandholm, developer of the program. "And to win, the machine has to out-smart its human opponents." In total, that will be 1,500 hands played per day until May 8, with just one day off to allow the real-life players to rest.
An earlier version of the software called Tartanian 7 (PDF) was successful in winning the heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold'em category against other computers in July, but Sandholm says that does not necessarily mean it will be able to defeat a human in the complex game. "I think it's a 50-50 proposition," says Sandholm. "My strategy will change more so than when playing against human players," says competitor Doug Polk, widely considered the world's best player, with total live tournament earnings of more than $3.6 million. "I think there will be less hand reading so to speak, and less mind games. In some ways I think it will be nice as I can focus on playing a more pure game, and not have to worry about if he thinks that I think, etc."
An earlier version of the software called Tartanian 7 (PDF) was successful in winning the heads-up, no-limit Texas Hold'em category against other computers in July, but Sandholm says that does not necessarily mean it will be able to defeat a human in the complex game. "I think it's a 50-50 proposition," says Sandholm. "My strategy will change more so than when playing against human players," says competitor Doug Polk, widely considered the world's best player, with total live tournament earnings of more than $3.6 million. "I think there will be less hand reading so to speak, and less mind games. In some ways I think it will be nice as I can focus on playing a more pure game, and not have to worry about if he thinks that I think, etc."
Will the computer be prohibited from counting cards? Humans may bluff, but they cannot fake statistics.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
But can it make me a sandwich?
I think it's important to note that while we're good at making AI good at one thing, we're still a very long way from making it good at general skills.
not have to worry about if he thinks that I think, etc.
I think he's wrong on this. A computer would still need to consider what his opponent thinks he holds and raise accordingly.
Poker games take time (hours), people grow tired, computers don't.
People struggle at memorizing chances, taking shortcuts, computers have exact picture talking into account every single bit.
All one needs is behavior that is random enough, for human players not to guess if computer is bluffing.
Then, of course, there is luck factor, so results will fluctuate quite a bit.
I think there will be less hand reading so to speak, and less mind games.
Isn't that what makes the game so interesting? Any good card game involves messing with your opponent's head.
The only winning move is not to play.
It's poker that's dumb enough to be on TV. If they want a real challenge they should play seven stud.
Poker is bullshit.
Try playing without looking at your cards. Suddenly you've taken the human element away from the other player and it becomes a game of classic war. Did my random pile of cards beat his random pile of cards? You will never win but im pretty sure you wont lose either.
Why? Because poker is bullshit random flop of the cards and people have turned it into a game they think requires skill.
Poker is at least as much about psychology (reading your opponents' body language) as about anything else. You cannot do that to a computer program. This is not a true test of AI.
Teaching computers to beat humans at bluffing, decoying, and no doubt (now or in time) lying? Is that what we want AI to be capable of? I'm not sure that is a good idea, and the code to do that should never be among the "standard includes". I understand the utility of it in dealing with humans, but still ...
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
This guy here can make a sandwich and many other things that humans can do for about $4/hour.
What, are you kidding me? Bluff has him ranked as number 36. That's pretty good, but a far cry from "widely considered the world's best."
I'd like to see a Mahjong playing robot. Preferably with big tits and no underwear.
Unfortunately the AI has a tell, his hard-disk lights flash when he's bluffing.
Amusingly, Bluff magazine has a ranking of the best HUNL players where he's number one. But he's written the list himself :)
He really is among the best heads up no limit players though.
Have gnu, will travel.
There a lies (bluffing), damned liars (poker players), and then there are statistics and probability (so-called AI). A good neural network will learn from the patterns of the opposition, and then get pwnd when the opposition changes tactics (human adaptive algorithms). Anyway, this will be interesting to observe! :-)
in a game of dice? Surely there must be some way of winning that with an AI...
TFS refers to TFA which refers to another TFA, and all of them are pathetically written. Here's a link at CMU discussing the competition. This is the second link in TFS, but it's not clear that all of the other links in the first paragraph are just trash.
In any case, a couple of points and/or musings:
As a final note: may I please encourage submitters and/or our illustrious editors to not fluff up submissions with links to crappy articles that miss most of the important points? Just the source link would have been enough - it's a good article with real information written in actual English.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
2017 the fusion generators come online (think I'm joking? http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html )
2022 ai replaces all common jobs money is abolished
2025 the replicators come on line and we live in a postindustrial phase
the singularity is coming
> will play nearly 20,000 hands with each human poker player over the next two weeks.
elsewhere it says there are 4 participants, so that is 2500 hands per player week -- and that is quite a bit faster than normal human play, even at this level, even heads-up.
I would guess that the game will just end up being more random. Humans are bad at being random number generators, so that opens the window for psychological strategies. A computer can be a pretty near perfect random number generator, and therefore is immune to the psychological aspect of the game. It could try to exploit this weakness in the human players through some kind of psychological heuristic algorithm, but I think that also opens the door to it being tricked by those same human players especially if they successfully guess what strategy the AI is using. It may just be better to go by the numbers.
This would be very profitable. If I were an evil asshole with no ethics I would love to buy or rent such software out and put in a fake virtual player for each session. No way I would ever lose money unless through very odd anomalies. Oh hell who am I kidding this is how half of Las Vegas works where they hire statisticians to favor the house as much as possible.
You are dumb to ever think you can win and are just smarter than the other guys
http://saveie6.com/
...is call you out for winning a hand by "playing wrong" and insisting that if you would just play correctly, it wouldn't be losing.
The computer can count cards perfectly and brute force calculate the odds of each possible hand. The computer has no "tell"; but on the other hand, it probably can't read any human tells either. Over enough hands, the computer is always going to come out ahead, just by better calculation of probabilities. Artificial Intelligence isn't really required to give it an advantage, and other than being able to read the faces and tells of opponents, I'm not sure AI is even useful for poker. Of course, the software is probably also trying to use past bluffing history to predict when opponents are bluffing, giving this somewhat of the flavor of the Rock, Paper, Scissors programming competition (my quick and dirty algorithm sucked at that).
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Poker is 90% luck and 10% skill..