What about poker can math not figure out?

Popinjay · #1 03-26-2005, 03:58 AM

What's stopping a brilliant mathematician from figuring poker out and creating an ultimate demon poker bot? What is it about poker that isn't driven by math, or solvable by math and instead the human being himself?

housenuts · #2 03-26-2005, 04:00 AM

the fact that you don't have all the numbers.

that's like saying 2 + x = y

all you know is that y is greater than x, but there is no way you can solve it.

Popinjay · #3 03-26-2005, 04:08 AM

Can you be more specific? Sure you don't know what your opponent holds but there is such a thing as hand range right? And that could be decided by numbers yes? Just like how we use VPIP/PFR numbers to determine what we think our opponent has.

FrankLu99 · #4 03-26-2005, 04:08 AM

[ QUOTE ]
the fact that you don't have all the numbers.

that's like saying 2 + x = y

all you know is that y is greater than x, but there is no way you can solve it.

[/ QUOTE ]

x = 2; y = 4

jdl22 · #5 03-26-2005, 04:11 AM

time

Poker is a ridiculously complicated game in terms of game theory.

Popinjay · #6 03-26-2005, 04:13 AM

[ QUOTE ]
time

Poker is a ridiculously complicated game in terms of game theory.

[/ QUOTE ]

So game theory can explain it all?

housenuts · #7 03-26-2005, 05:02 AM

[ QUOTE ]
What's stopping a brilliant mathematician from figuring poker out and creating an ultimate demon poker bot? What is it about poker that isn't driven by math, or solvable by math and instead the human being himself?

[/ QUOTE ]

this probably could be done. in fact in caro's book of tells he writes about a machine he made in 1984 or something that did just that. and i bet there are many bots out there online.

but still look at IBM's deep blue (i think that's what it was called) that played chess against kasparov. it had all the information and still couldn't win 100% of the time.

Blankstare · #8 03-26-2005, 05:21 AM

Correct me if I'm wrong... but math cannot figure out people and I think they are an important part of poker.

So ultimately math cannot tell you if you will ultimately be a winner or loser at poker.

Sure it can put you in the best position to come out a winner or a not so big loser but in the end there are variables you cannot account for and those variables may be completely random and totally unpredictable in nature.

However you have to step back and realize that 3 out of the 4 elements required to play poker can be represented mathematically; money, rules of poker, and deck of 52 cards.

So when 3-of-the-4 elements have "mathematical realities" you can see that knowing poker math is vital even if it can't figure everything out because it can tell you a lot.

My $0.02

JasonE · #9 03-26-2005, 06:40 AM

Math is pretty good. There are computers today that do well at low limit games - Loki at Stanford, for example, plays pretty much perfect poker by Sklansky's The Theory of Poker (or so I'm told). This makes it very good against regular players. However, it is very unsophisticated in betting. It has a hard time reading a bluff. It is completely unable to tell if you are bluffing now to get caught and trap it later. Not to say that it never could guess these kinds of things, but it's not very close yet.

So, you can teach a bot to play very good poker. A computer can never play 'perfect' poker, though, for the same reason that a human can't. You don't know what your opponent has, and your opponent can do things to make you think he has something he doesn't and your opponent knows you are trying to guess what he has so he can change his tactics.

Also, to touch on something someone else said about incomplete information: if you don't have all the information (like you do in, say, chess), you can't know what to do with certainty. All you can do is maximize your expectation. This does not stop smart math guys from studying the subject, though. The classic example is the prisoner's dilemma. Imagine two criminals arrested under the suspicion of having committed a crime together. However, the police do not have sufficient proof to convict either of them. The two prisoners are isolated from each other, and the police visit each of them and offer a deal: the one who offers evidence against the other one will be freed. If neither of them accepts the offer, both of them will get only a small punishment because of lack of proof. They both gain. However, if one of them betrays the other one, by confessing to the police, the snitch will gain more, since he is freed; the one who remained silent, on the other hand, will receive the full punishment, since he did not help the police, and there is sufficient proof. If both snitch, both will be punished, but less severely than if they had refused to talk. The dilemma resides in the fact that each prisoner has a choice between only two options, but cannot make a good decision without knowing what the other one will do.

That's game theory.

pzhon · #10 03-26-2005, 08:22 AM

I would bet a lot of money that there will be excellent poker programs in the future.

There are many things about poker that are not mathematical. Your opponents may give away extra information in the form of tells. People play nonoptimally in predictable fashions. You have some information about how your opponents are playing based on the actions you have observed. You can consturct mathematical models for some of these, but there are pieces of information that come from human experience, not the rules of the game.

Even though these are not part of an ideal, mathematical solution to poker, a program playing poker close to optimally would play extremely well in practice.