Poker Bot piece

[Pirc Defense]

Saw this at www.techdirt.com and wanted to pass it along.

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A few years ago, we wrote about how online poker players were often getting assistance from training tools that told them what to do in certain situations. Of course, since then, there's been something of an online poker bubble generating a ton of attention and money. So, with that, it really shouldn't be any surprise that poker bots are becoming much more popular, allowing people to just let the bot play hands for them while they do something more productive (like sleep). While there are lots of arguments about ethics and whether this is legal, that didn't seem to be the most interesting part of the article. In fact, the article seems to have brushed over the most interesting part of the article itself. Apparently, the most popular bot, WinHoldEm, lets users tweak strategies -- and it's the strategies and not the bot that makes someone a winner. In fact, the article suggests it's becoming popular for users to swap and trade different formula sets. In other words, unlike what most people think of when they think of bots invading a game, there is still strategy involved, it's just that the strategy is in tweaking your bot to the best of its ability, which could actually depend on who the bot is playing against (and, assuming other bots are playing, how they're tweaked). So, perhaps the more modern equivalent to sports and games won't be your own feats of strength or strategy -- but how you tweak a computer to play for you.

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It's going to happen, it's just a question of when. Denying this is to overlook nearly every lesson of history.