Humans Can Still Out-Bluff Machines 279
Pcol writes "The New York Times reports that in a poker game this week between man and machine, a program called Polaris fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional poker players. Designing a poker playing algorithm is a different and more difficult challenge for software designers than chess and checkers because of uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player and difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors such as bluffing. The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move and a top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. Polaris build a series of "bots" that have differing personalities or styles of play, ranging from aggressive to passive. Researchers monitored the performance of three bots and then moved them in and out of the lineup like football players."
Not harder than chess (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not harder than chess (Score:5, Insightful)
Hold'em is all about betting - if, when, and how much. And THAT you determine by the behavior of your opponent. It's not a strategy game, but a psychological exercise.
Re:Not harder than chess (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not harder than chess (Score:5, Insightful)
So, then the play comes down to responding to how the other person is playing. And the edge goes to the one that can safely be unreadable/unpredictable/inconsistent.
Now, obviously if you can't figure out any of the statistics involved in a hand you will always get your ass handed to you in the long run by a player/machine that can do the most rudimentary calculation.
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I'd venture to say that pot-limit omaha high is a *far* more psychological game
I agreed 100% and would put most stud games even above omaha in the amount of psychology in the game, but I said "played regularly" which from my experience limits the games to Texas Hold'em, Omaha hi/lo and 7 Stud hi/lo, and usually only limit for the later two, since they are the most common spread games, at least in the united states. I have actually never seen a Pot Limit Omaha High game in any casino I have been in and that's not a small number (though I am holding an HA rotation next week so I am cer
Re:Not harder than chess (Score:4, Informative)
You'd be wrong. I made my living for two years playing PLO almost exclusively, at a high level (fuck you UIGEA and everyone who voted for you). The general consensus among students of the game is that PLO is one of the least psychological games played. The lack of bluffing being the major reason. Bluffing occurs, but the very same reason you cite as making it more psychological is why you're wrong the number of hands played. Playing such a large number of hand (50% is insane, and I challenge you to show me some poker tracker stats of someone who wins playing 50% of their hands long term). In fact, if a computer were to win consistently, I think PLO is a game that it would play.
"I don't think there's a difference between statistical knowledge and psychology."
Then let me learn you up. Let's use PLO. I have A-A-10-J double suited. I raise pot preflop. A VERY tight player reraises, and I call. Flop come K-K-K. Against an aggro player, I can reasonably infer that my 2nd nuts is good. Against Mr. Tighty, who I have seen reraise only with large suited pairs (KKJQ, QQJ10) or rundown hands (9-10-J-Q, 10-J-Q-K) I know within a certain range what he's holding, with some certainty. I am first to act, I check, he bets, I raise, and Mr. Tighty RERAISES. Based on my assessment of his likely behavior (psychology) I can reasonably infer that he has the K. Statistically, you NEVER lay down K's full of A's, but when your read (psychology) is good and the opponent is uncreative and direct (psychology) you lay it down.
Statistically the correct play is to put it all in if you can, but by understanding the other players decision making process (psychology) you can find a fold.
You're wrong again
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Statistically, you NEVER lay down K's full of A's...
If you actually think this is true you are using some bad statistics. I don't think that you do think it is true as you said yourself you would fold in the described situation. Even if you are taking all other information out of the equation statisiticaly K's full of A's (with 3 Ks on board) will lose approximately 1 in 11 times (opponent has 4 chances to have a king out of the 45 unseen cards). This means statistically you should lay down kings full of aces 1 out of every 11 times you play, but you woul
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I think the point is that you don't know if it is the 1 time you lose, or the 10 times you win, so you would go for the win since, 10 out of 11 times, you would win. Who cares if you lose that 1 time if you win the other 10 times. That's why you never lay them down since, statistically, you are 10 times more likely to win than lose.
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so its a a form of entertainment they pay for. Professional poker
players are no more a leach on society than opera singers.
Old joke ,,, (Score:3, Funny)
He shows how in the long run, all players will lose to the casino.
His son nods and nods with his explanation. At the end,
the father said, "Well son, have you learn anything from this lession?"
"Yes indeed. I'm going to open a casino when I grow up!"
Re:Not harder than chess (Score:4, Informative)
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You tell yourself that. But it's BS. Poker, when it comes down to it, is all about a) statistics, and b) luck. Is there a psychological component to it? Sure. But I'll bet dollars to donuts those aspects are greatly outweighed by luck and a given player's ability to evaluate the statistics on a given hand.
Re:Not harder than chess (Score:4, Interesting)
You: Pair of 2's, check
Him: Ace-high, all-in
Now do you call or fold? You have the better hand here. If you knew what your opponent had you would definitely call. But since you are playing the odds, you decide to fold because you calculated you have a 30% of winning, which also means you have a 70% of losing. This is why playing the odds will cause you to lose. This is why it is the "psychological exercise" that the grandparent said it was.
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Just because it's not about you wanting to have sex with your mom doesn't mean it's not psychology.
Pre-flop odds are all calculated on what your hand is. Statistically you know your chances on winning are. Your opponent's hand doesn't matter to you since it's unknown to you and doesn't factor into the odds.
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In a magazine profile, the writer played heads-up with Daniel for two hours. After the first half hour, Daniel was calling the writer's hole cards with astonishing accuracy.
You may not want to use the term psychology to describe this skill, but millions will disagree with you.
Re:Not harder than chess (Score:4, Informative)
In limit games against unskilled opponents, you're right. In other games, the psychology is much more important. And in fact, if you want to do the probabilities right, you need the psychology. There's almost no hand of interest you can analyze properly without an estimate of some quantity like "the probability this bozo would make that raise in this situation." Is it statistical analysis or psychology? Is it the sugar or the stirring?
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One could imagine that a "psychological exercise" is still a strategy game, but with much wider priors in the statistics.
As Negreanu put it (Score:2)
(not an exact quote)
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That's not entirely true - you can theoretically process all the possible moves, but, you still won't know the result until you know what the hole cards are.
In chess, the player's moves determine what happens on the board. In poker, you can't change what happens on the board; you can only change how much money you win or lose as the game progresses.
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First of all, moderators, this is mistaken, not "Flamebait".
Second, you're correct that the cards are trivial to calculate. The betting process in poker is what's much more difficult to model.
Watching it occasionally on ESPN, I see people who are presumably good enough to be on television doing things that are completely insane. (Why the hell would anyone go all-in with unsuited 8-3?!?) It
Re:Not harder than chess (Score:5, Informative)
The other situation to try it in is a squeeze play- if you have a raise and a call behind you, you have a very tight table image, and you think they don't have good hands. A raise, especially an all in raise, is signaling an extremely good hand. From a tight player, this must be respected. You can get both players to fold here if they don't have premium hands (AK, QQ-AA). This is a high risk move though, and you must have been playing extremely tight, versus people capable of laying down a good hand, to try it.
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Anyway, all this reinforces the point that modeling poker is *hard*.
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I thought the loser was going to start a fight when he left the table. Entertaining. One of the things about humanity is that we're willing to take a chance on
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poker jargon pedantry (Score:2, Informative)
well, no. not if the guy was dealt a "suited pair" from a single deck.
There's no such thing as a "suited pair" in a single deck.
You have four distinct suits, and thirteen distinct ranks. There is one card of each of the thirteen ranks in each suit, and likewise there is exactly one card of each suit at a given rank.
A "pair" is two cards of the same rank. "Suited" means two cards of the same suit. So to have a "suited pair", one must have two cards of the same rank and the same suit.
The
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Because when you're bluffing, you don't bluff half-way so they'll call you on it (as opposed to when you're not bluffing and want to fish for more chips), and if someone with a top hand decides to call you on it, your medium hand will probably lose anyway. So if you're looking to make the others fold, unsuited 8-3 is as good a bluff as any other hand. Besides, if you're in a squeeze and hit the right company you can still win and get back in the figh
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Douglas Adams invented a word for this:
ABOYNE (vb.) [langmaker.com] To beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him.
Much harder than chess. (Score:2)
In poker, neither player knows where all the 'pieces' are.
So the problem the computer has to solve is totally different. In chess, the computer has to compute the best next move. In poker, the computer has to determine if it's hand is better than the opponent's hand, AND if its hand is better, win as much money from the opponent as possible, AND if its hand is weaker, lose as little money as possible, OR convince the op
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Maybe so, but in chess and checkers you can see the other person's pieces.
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The effect of counting cards is decreased by not playing the back-half to
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This is beyond simple mathematical calculations and hence it's MUCH harder than chess.
Chess is much more than just simple calculations. It is full of very complex calculations. Because of the incredibly huge number of moves possible it is more than just calculating. The best computer chess programs calculate less and use pattern recognition more. These days a computer with a fraction of the computing power of Deep Blue would beat it. T
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everyone plays in certain patterns and even when someone tries to change their own game they do it in their own personal way
Many good players use game theory and randomization to actually remove their own personality from a certain percentage of their plays. Beating a computer that is using pattern recognition is still very easy and will be for the foreseeable future. Imagine in for 1 out of every 5 decisions a player needs to make during a poker match that player flips a coin to determine their action. The computer may eventually be able to determine that the 5th action will always be random, but one it won't help and two y
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yea well (Score:5, Funny)
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Flexo: Augh!
Bender: Pervert!
Only expert players .... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a sneaking suspicion that, for the vast majority of players, the computer is gonna kick your ass quite handily.
For the same reasons, I suspect that everyone who wasn't at the level of Kasparov would have gotten their asses handed to them in a game of chess against older versions of computers which couldn't yet beat him.
This, of course, begs the question of how long it will take for the on-line casinos to start putting poker playing bots into the mix to skew the odds even further to the house. I mean, if you have a computer program which will beat everyone else, why not just dial it down so it only wins 30% of the time or so and nobody will be any wiser.
Cheers
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In poker, professional players barely beat out amatuers nowadays.
My friend and I wrote an interesting poker program which sets up a table of 10 on a standard sit and go style table, and plays through 10,000 iterations to see which bot is the best.
Me, being the slacker, never made any bots to play his so it kinda fizzled out because I'm a bum... But it did have potential.
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Allow me to clarify ... how's professional-level or exceedingly talented amateurs grab you? Playing poker full-time wasn't really meant to be the thing which differentiated.
The reality is, pro or amateur, the overwhelming majority of users would NOT come anywhere close to winning against this program. They simply wouldn't have the skills at poker to even come close.
Cheers
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If they would put bots to play against you in a casino, they'll need more bots to grab you in the middle of the street and threaten with death if you don't come inside and play.
The idea of a casino is, it seems plausible you may win. It's very important to keep that plausability.
As for computations, they are ALREADY used in casinos, t
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It would be very tempting to add bots to the game in order to add a house cut. And who would know?
-Zipwow
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The Poker Bots already exist (Score:2)
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For the same reasons, I suspect that everyone who wasn't at the level of Kasparov would have gotten their asses handed to them in a game of chess against older versions of computers which couldn't yet beat him.
Current reality is that any of the better [wikipedia.org] chess programs [wikipedia.org] for PCs can trounce you, unless you've been on the cover of Chess Life. Grandmasters are now playing Rybka with Rybka handicapped by one pawn, or with no opening book, and still losing fairly often. It's clear that computer chess performa
Hang on a Minute... (Score:5, Informative)
Is that really true?! It seems very counterintuitive.
Certainly there's nothing special in general about games involving bluff. One of Von Neumann's first game theory case studies involved a simplified version of poker precisely to demonstrate how to automate bluffing.
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Perhaps if you randomly bluffed, with an x% chance of bluffing on a given hand, and the rest of the time bet on the true merit of the hand?
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http://chappie.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/roshambot [stanford.edu]
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I think there are known equilibrium mixed strategies for some situations involving bluffs, just not the entire game.
Re:Hang on a Minute... (Score:5, Informative)
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It seems to me that bluffing is a reactive or anticipatory activity. The optimal strategy would therefore depend on what strategy the other player is using. Since the other player can choose any arbitrary strategy, this does not seem like an easily solvable problem.
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Under these conditions:
10% 50
20% 150
30% 350
20% 700
10% 1500
5% 3000
5% 10000
And then on the evaluating side, under these conditions a bet of 700 means:
nothing: 30%
one pair: 20%
two pairs: 20%
three of a kind: 20%
better than that: 10%
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. For one, who's sitting on the blinds, how many have called or bet and by how much and how many have folded, are you before or after the other guy, what's my chip stack and wha
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Bluffing, like the widely-held understanding of tells, are way overestimated in their value to the game.
By far the most valuable skill in poker is people reading. Not looking for tics, flinches, or whatever, but by understanding how they react to situations. How do they play flush draws? What kinds of cards will they play with given an under-the-gun raise, when in mid position? What size bets will they call with mediocre hands, and what size bets will they fold strong hands to?
These are far, far more im
Looks like it'll be this way. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
probability (Score:2)
How far we've come. (Score:5, Funny)
Eliza: What does that suggest to you?
Dealer: It suggests I'm giving you your cards.
Eliza: We can talk about me later. Now back to you...
Guest: Here you go.
Eliza: So you feel I go...
Guest: Um.. yeah. How many cards do you want?
Eliza: What else comes to mind when you ask that?
Dealer: You need to give me whatever cards you want to exchange.
Eliza: I see. Tell me more.
Dealer: Um.. so you can get a better hand?
Eliza: We were discussing you--not me.
Dealer: Do you have any interest in playing this game?
Eliza: Oh, I have any interest in playing this game?
Dealer: That's it, I quit! Go find someone else to torture!
Eliza: That would't help much, now, would it?
Minimax (Score:2)
I believe that the summary is referring to a "minimax" tree here. In a perfect information game (which most forms of poker technically are), you can construct a tree, each tier of which contains every possible "move" that the active player can make during that turn (each of these "moves" are nodes of the tree). Each node
Once again, the computer cheats (Score:2)
(Or rather, the people using the computer cheat.)
From one of the rounds of human-computer chess matches of recent years, I remember something about the computer analyzing previous games played by the human opponent, while the human was given no such background on the computer. Studying an opponent's history of play is accepted; the issue here is one side had this aid while the other did not.
Anyway, in this case,
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I thought top-tier players were supposed to be able to change up their game style at the drop of a hat in order to prevent others from reading them?
I'm stupefied (Score:2)
What the article misses is that if there was an actual android having camera eyes and being allowed to use its full processing power, it'd simply count the cards and beat every single damn time.
But sure, introduce noise and win sometimes if it makes you better. They gotta introduce dice rolling in chess as well:
"Haha, HAL, you threw an even number, which means I take your queen for no reason at all and you can't do
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I don't mean count literally. In any way recognize the card order. It may even be about specs on the back of each card invisible with simple eye.
Computers can scale and improve their detection detail by simply tacking on a better/faster device to use. Humans have to do with their own eyes/brain.
Can we really? (Score:2)
Playing the long-con.
stratego, l'attaque, dover patrol, tri-tactics etc (Score:4, Insightful)
H.
More info on Polaris (Score:2)
Chance elements make this hard to judge (Score:2, Informative)
You can flip a coin 5 times and all 5 might be heads... doesn't mean that heads
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Poker has an eliment of chance, however chance doesn't explain why you consistently see the top pros at final tables. A poker pro will know how to do the following
1) Read another player
2) Know how to maximize reward compared to risk
3) Adjust play to compensate for 1 and 2
Poker is a game of skill with chance invovled. Since Chance is equal (over the long haul) between all players, chance doesn't explain repeat
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Who are also quite frequently tossed out in the first round.
No, it's not entirely luck. Pure number crunching skill is also quite important, both in calculating the odds, as well as in determine risk-reward for a given situation, deciphering player's betting strategies, etc. Such skills take time to master, so it's hardly surprising that the more experienced, practiced players typically per
Environmental Sensors (Score:5, Interesting)
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No. They shouldnt be allowed to observe anything a person cant. I cant get up in the middle of a poker game and attempt to stick a thermometer into my opponent's rear to see if he's lying. Why not just put a camera behind him and read his cards? How do you propose we detect sweat? Measuring skin resistance? You cant do that in a real game either.
I think a plain-jane camera would be allowed, but even then its pretty unfair. The human player has no face to look at to potentiall
Limit Holdem (Score:5, Informative)
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The worst part of it, is it's always (always!) spouted by somebody who is so incapable at limit, that they couldn't beat a 20/40 game, let alone any of the high stakes games.
Limit hold'em doesn't televise well because it's hard for an amateur to understand the nuance of what's going on.
Example:
A loose and aggressive button open-raises, and you defend the big blind with ATo. The flop comes down: A82r. You know your o
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And I think your point is dead false, especially when it comes to televised poker, in which the blinds are always very large, and the stacks quite short, meaning that the correct move is almost always mathematically provable, if one had the inclination.
If one was allowed, one could sit at the table with software like SNG Analyzer [sitngo-analyzer.com], enter the tournament structure, and assuming the player was capable of making decent estimates of people's rai
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About the computational issue you are actually incorrect here, and there is an objective fact of the matter. The reason most poker AI only attempts Heads Up Limit poker at this point is because there are more degrees of freedom in NLHE. At each decision point in a limit match the only options are bet, call, or fold
Real life poker has more factors to it (Score:2)
If you play on the internet, you rely solely on these three factors, but today's poker celebrities also rely on psyching the opponent and reveal tells. If the bot was capable of emotions as well as reading its opponents emotions, this would be far more interesting.
In the meantime, congress doesn't believe poker is a game of skill.
emergent behavior (Score:2)
this isn't man vs machine (Score:2)
until we approach digital sentience that's all we're really doing, isn't it?
Well, in that case... (Score:4, Funny)
The problem is the software (Score:2)
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Isn't this like facing world's best soccer player and the computer in a match of Fifa Soccer 2007?
Perhaps, but it's hard to say this gives the computer an advantage it wouldn't have anyway. If it's straight man versus machine, the machine only sees cards and bets, so it can't r
Not a surprise: Evolved brains surely better (Score:2)
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Newsflash: Brains developed over millions of years still outperform computers that have been in development only in the last few centuries. Verdict: Human ingenuity isn't advanced enough to outrun natural evolution (at least not yet), and we still don't know everything about intelligence and computation. Is this a surprise?
We don't know, from the article, how it would do against a sample of average poker players. If it would beat them more than 50% of the time, would you think THAT was a newsflash? Why do you have to question the interest of an article like this just because "we still don't know everything about intelligence and computation." Did anyone say we did?
The computers weren't really playing... (Score:2, Insightful)
So in a sense the computer wasn't really playing anyhow. I suspect that deciding which bots to move in and out is another skill that humans are better at than computers.
Humans Can Still Out-Bluff Machines (Score:5, Funny)
Second day was not a fair competition (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/man-machin
The U of A team gave the humans the logs of the first two games!
Perhaps after the entire match they could have reviewed the game logs, however this give the humans an unfair advantage during the second day. I can't believe that this isn't getting more attention -- they bascially gave the human team a huge insight into the inner workings, strategy, and tendencies of their opponent. Something that Polaris definitely did not have.
In my opinion this sours the competition and completely invalidates the final two matches. The human likely found a weakness (or two or three) and exploited it, and we can't know for sure that they would have found the weakness without those logs.
That was a huge mistake by the U of A team, and they have apparently got away with it without anyone noticing.
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Yes, I just invoked Godwin's Law Junior.
Randomness doesn't mean hard (Score:2)
Also, just because the computer won't always win, doesn't mean it isn't better than human. Suppose I made a poker program with X-Ray visions and then played against a random guy. With my X-Ray vision I decided I have a 95% chance to win when the guy went all in, but lost due to a bad draw. Unlike Chess, no matter how good your computer is, there's always a chance you won't win.
When Deep Blu
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's cheating. The computer wasn't playing. (Score:5, Funny)
RTFA. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:RTFA. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:RTFA. (Score:4, Informative)
why so wordy? (Score:4, Funny)
#include <stdio.h>
#include <poker.h>
int main() {
printf("Hello, world. I am a poker-playing robot. Prepare to lose your shirt.\n")
while (!win_poker_game()) {
printf("Curses! Another game, human?"\n")
}
printf("Ha ha!\n")
(void)rake_in_chips()
return(0)
}