saabpo: Bot or Joke?

[gomberg]

True, you can write bots that vary their play. It's already done - it's still tough as crap to do it correctly though. Good luck creating 1 solid winning style, much less 5. It takes years of hard work.

It's true you could probably make a winning low limit bot right now with some decent effort - but to beat tougher opponents, it's going to take a lot of research and programming effort. Machine-learning is slow and very difficult to implement correctly.

[nnoobi]

My comments are against the thought that a bot couldn't play poker successfully. I know there isn't a good bot out now, but I disagree with the idea that is out there - that humans must be better than bots because of the very nature of poker.

This comes from Kasparov in one of the Deep Blue games:
After seeing a move from on-the-defensive Deep Blue, Kasparov becomes convinced that Deep Blue is cheating. Humans must be secretly helping it -- because no computer would have selected that move.

The man may be the best chess player ever, but he sounds like a guy complaining that his all-in bluff just caught called by the board's low-pair.


rabbit

[Loveless]

I'm pretty sure a bot that will win in the long run against any competition isnt that hard to code. That is, once you have defined the rules it should follow. I base this statement on the following.

1) Anything that can be defined in a single answer question can be written as a program.
2) Everything can be defined in such a question.

This theorem was defined by Alan Turing and is regarded as a base in most areas in computer sience.

So where does this leave us? That all that is needed is a progam that for every possible situation can answer the following questions.
1) Should I fold?
2) Should I raise?
3) Should I call/check?

Clearly the amount of information given isnt enough to answer this (no difference between a bot or a human), but a bot can from every situation use game theory to approximate the best answer. Sure, a human being can do this too, but we dont have the ability to be as precise as a computer and we let our emotions affect our thoughts.