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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. The pros — Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les — will receive appearance fees derived from a prize purse of $100,000 donated by Microsoft Research and by Rivers Casino. 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 of Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em, 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."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @03:16PM
"I have no idea if the following is true, but it seems to me that there might be a perfect strategy where a non-loser would completely ignore other players' possible motivations, would not try to guess any hands, and just derive its moves from the amount in the pot, its own chip stack, and the odds of having the winning hand (assuming some static "non-losing" distribution of opponents' hands, the same as the one the non-loser itself plays). The existence of such a strategy seems plausible to me because what's the point of "reading" the opponents if we can assume they leak no useful information?"
Any poker player with any experience easily has a general good intuition of the odds of winning a given hand and how they should act, given the current situation, based purely on statistics. Any professional poker player worth his or her salt knows the statistics of each hand very well (it's rather easy to compute). But always acting on such intuition will make you predictable and a predictable player does not make for a good player in poker at all. If others can predict that you will always act the same purely on facts they will easily predict your probable hand based on your actions and they will easily act accordingly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @03:29PM
In poker you don't want your opponent to know your hand. That would defeat the whole purpose of the game. If everyone knew everyone's hand the game would be very boring and there would be no point. If a machine acts purely on some statistical algorithm that machine will be predictable, people will easily be able to predict what hand it has. That makes for a bad poker player because people will simply fold when they know you have a good hand and you will fold when the odds are against you even if your opponents have worse hands and are simply bluffing (and if you fold your opponent essentially wins the round and takes the jackpot).