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Poker Program Battles Humans In Vegas
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 03, 2008 05:08 PM
from the leds-blink-when-they're-bluffing dept.
from the leds-blink-when-they're-bluffing dept.
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.'"
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An anonymous reader writes "You probably knew that the Deep Blue supercomputer beats chess masters, and that last weekend a software robot defeated four poker champions. But you may have missed this one: a GE Fanuc robot is taking on humans at air hockey. The robot is powered by a special PC-board that can instantly switch between 8-bit and its 32-bit modes. The 8-bit version lost to most human players, but the 32-bit microcontroller has defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of three to one."
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Tell (Score:5, Funny)
When it's bluffing, it blinks twice.
Lets mess with it (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Additional cards not needed. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Additional cards not needed. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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They have to turn the monitor on it's side (Score:5, Funny)
If they want to correctly display the advanced AI "poker face": :|
Re:They have to turn the monitor on it's side (Score:5, Funny)
8|
He's doing the eyes again! May as well fold.
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Zero sum game (Score:5, Insightful)
Poker is a zero sum game. Pit two of these 'perfect' players against each other, and one of them will lose money.
Re:Zero sum game (Score:5, Funny)
Almost exactly what I was thinking, but for me it was "put 3 of these computers against each other and they'll devalue the currency?".
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Re:Zero sum game (Score:5, Funny)
Of course if the pool of money is not unlimited, then in the short term one will pull ahead of the other, and can "win" through sheer random chance. This isn't really that hard of a concept, the idea is that if another player is playing slightly suboptimally, then against this computer and both with a limitless pool of money and playing forever, the computer will slowly but surely pull ahead of the flawed opponent. It does not mean the computer will win against the human players in Vegas for several reasons:
This reminds me of an old mathematician joke:
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It's not fair... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
These people don't understand poker (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:These people don't understand poker (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure you're entirely correct. Poker is a game of skill, yes, but so is chess. The difference is that poker is based on incomplete information whereas chess is not. That just means you have to play probabilities though.
The whole tells topic is important in professional poker for increasing your odds against flawed human players. That can give you an edge over the basic statistics. However, if you're playing a computer that doesn't have any tells, my intuition says that the game reduces to basic probability.
That means the computer, given enough computational resources to play a perfect game, can wipe the floor with amateurs, and will be more closely matched (but never at a disadvantage) with the best players.
That doesn't mean that the computer would be unbeatable. Since the game is based on probability, you could still beat the computer, but in the limit you could only expect to win as many games as you lost.
The computer would also be at a disadvantage if it were playing a game with multiple human players. A good psychological poker player could use his advantage over the other humans at the table to take a chip lead, which would be an advantage over the computer.
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Re:These people don't understand poker (Score:5, Insightful)
The assumption here is that the computer has no tells. That is not a safe assumption. Most tells aren't about whether or not the guy licks the oreo on a bluff (Reference: Rounders), heart rate (a really good tell), pupil diameter, or galvanic skin response. They are about how an opponent plays in a particular situation. After a few rounds you get a feel for the types of starting hands a player will play, and their betting patterns. Unless the software opponent has each and every one of these actions randomized to a good extent, it will be read and played. "Perfect" poker software is not impossible, but it is a harder problem than it looks.
-ellie
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perfect game? (Score:5, Funny)
i don't believe it. he's bluffing
Link to the competition page (Score:5, Informative)
http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/man-machine/ [ualberta.ca]
First match was a draw.
First hand... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:hmmmm (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is like "computer battle human in tennis" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Can't lose money? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a terribly difficult calculation to know if a bet has sufficient pot odds [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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Re:Can't lose money? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:Can't lose money? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:So What! it's Chess all over again! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:So What! it's Chess all over again! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because as they've said at their page [ualberta.ca] 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.
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Re:I'm at least as good as this software... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Reminds me of those... (Score:5, Insightful)
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