master level bot created?

[Rudbaeck]

[ QUOTE ]
unlike other games where computers have proven to be equal or supieror(sp?) to humans, i.e. chess and backgammon, poker has a large factor of "human" element.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually there isn't a human element in online poker. At all. All your decisions are based on statistical analysis, pattern recognition and crude profiling.

Poki combined with a PT database of a few million hands would do very well in most online games. There just isn't such a bot around though.

There hasn't been all that much research effort made on poker bots. It's not exactly fair to compare todays poker bots to todays chess bots. I guesstimate that by 1965 there had been more research done on chess bots than there has been on poker bots in 2005.

Both Doyle and Cloutier claim that their superior memory is what sets them apart as NL players. But neither hold even a candle to the memory sun of computers.

I think that in the coming decade we'll see a fair amount of bots which can both hold their own against superstars and extract near the maximum against weak opposition.

[Tuco]

[ QUOTE ]
you'd have to be pretty dedicated and tech savvy to stand a chance at avoiding detection

[/ QUOTE ]

Dedicated and tech savvy? As in someone who would spend countless hours developing a bot?

Shessh.

Tuco.

[primetime32]

The issue isnt whether someone can create a bot that can win, or whether they can create a bot that can win and be undetectable. I think that will eventually happen. The problem would be keeping it undetectable. And once it is found, you are banned and so is the money in your account. Then you have to work hard at trying to become undetectable again, only to be spotted eventually when the sites catch up.

Even if someone was able to stay one step ahead of the game, that is just one person cheating. To think that it can be mass produced and threaten online poker is a joke. Once it was sold publicly, the tech people at these sites would hire a tech guy to detect it or prevent its use. Then you have people holding hundred dollar bots that don't work.

People who cheat via IM or telephone are a far greater risk to us than the eventual bot invasion.

[Alobar]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Head. Sand.

[/ QUOTE ]

Useless. Response. Got any reason for saying that? Yes? care to enlighten us?

[/ QUOTE ]

actually its a very good response.

I've been saying this for a loooong time, but all the people who think its not possible for computers to beat humans because poker is a game of incomplete information, are completely clueless.

Whats really sad is that when it does happen and online poker is ruined, I wont be able to really enjoy spamming my "I told you so"'s everywhere, because I'll be poor and looking for a job [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[Freudian]

Vex on, vex off. Soon you will reach master level, young grasshopper.

[teddyFBI]

I heard they also landed a man on the moon -- wow!

(yawn -- when was this squib pulled from, 1981??)

[SlantNGo]

I agree 100%. The breakthrough in poker bots will come with a breakthrough in "learning algorithms", such as neural nets as you mentioned. Until then, bots will not be able to play at the level of top human players.

[ QUOTE ]
That's ironic because good poker players don't think very much. They make almost all decisions very quickly using a trained ability to recognize patterns. Neural net programs often do well at this type of application. I wonder if it would be possible to design one that read large numbers of hand histories played by an expert and learned to imitate his play.

From a game theory perspective there is such a thing as mathematically correct poker play that cannot be beaten in the long run. The mathematics is too complicated to work out exactly for complicated games like hold'em, but there is no reason that programs could not eventually be developed that would defeat any human opponent in the long run using game theory.

Of course beating expert players is not solely what it's all about. You would also want your computer poker player to analyze opponents past play, identify leaks, and modify its own play to exploit them. The computer's potential to remember and analyze thousands of hands will be a big plus here.

In summary, expert computer poker is hard and it isn't solved yet, but there is no special reason why it can't be done.

[/ QUOTE ]

[Tuco]

[ QUOTE ]
And once it is found, you are banned and so is the money in your account

[/ QUOTE ]

Thats a little like saying nobody will bother trying to embezzle money because if they are caught they have to give the money back. It's not much of a deterent that money is not yours gets confiscated.

[ QUOTE ]
Once it was sold publicly, the tech people at these sites would hire a tech guy to detect it or prevent its use. Then you have people holding hundred dollar bots that don't work.


[/ QUOTE ]

Any bot worth anything wouldn't be sold. Noone would pay what it would be worth.

Tuco.

[KJ o]

I thought this forum was chock full of Computer Science majors who actually learnt something, but this is obviously not the case. (Or rather, they have all learnt to skip ignorant ramblings like these.)

First of all, let's separate two things
1. A poker algorithm that can't be exploitable (i.e. beaten in the long run) (and remember that the long run is a *long* time in poker, and not a short tourney like the WSOP ME.)
2. A poker algorithm that beats particular opponents in a particular game at a rate reasonably close to the maximum possible level.

1 is difficult, but it's not *that* difficult, in partcular if one adds "beaten for more than the rake". It is almost definitely easier to write a poker bot which will not allow any human to beat a full ring of said bots for more than the rake (assuming fairly low limits, i.e. a significant rake) than it is to write a chess program that beats Kasparov.

Why, then, has the second happened, but not the first? For the very simple reason that hundreds (thousands) of times as much effort and money has been spent on chess compared to poker up until today.

2. is significantly harder, as it is basically 1. plus the learnings and adjustments. And it's debatale if it will ever be +EV to do this properly. It's not too valuable against world class opponents anyway and it is hopefully difficult to make anhy money on it against poor opponents.

This all hinges on one thing: that there is a game theoretical approach to poker that is not exploitable. This is not completely obvious, since the relationship between algorithm strengths could be non-transitive even for optimal algorithms.

I have seen several more or less convincing arguments for why there are optimal algorithms that are not exploitable, but nothing even remotely convincing suggesting otherwise. But I'd love to hear about any such argument!

[KJ o]

[ QUOTE ]
Any bot worth anything wouldn't be sold. Noone would pay what it would be worth.

[/ QUOTE ]

Why? Because you say so?

It is perfectly possible that no one will pay anything for a poker bot because they think along the lines of: "If I buy this program, others will probably as well. And then there will be many users, we will all get caught and I will gain nothing from doing so."

Meanwhile, IRL, I point you to WinHoldem or whatever it was (is?) called.

Are you suggesting that if Winholdem would have been great instead of bad, no one would have bought it?