Bots - quote from a chessmaster to discuss

[excession]

I think limit holdem and short stack NL (incl. SnG's which become short stack push games pretty fast) are all relatively easy for bots to get up to speed in now.. deep stack NL/MTT's are a much harder problem.
Also if bots take off the sites will have to restrict data-mining or even hh's entirely, so i'm not sure the cyborg analogy will hold good in the future

[Jinx]

I adjus my play according to my opponents. The fact that I check raise 50% of my opponents 100% of the time does not mean I check raise 50% of the time.

The bot may know my tendancies, but once I find out his I'll change my play to react and he won't be able to.

Then the bot will re-adjust and play you accordingly, otherwise you're playing a static strategy bot.

[Innocentius]

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Nobody will ever build a program to play poker at the same level programs exist to play chess, because as everyone points out every single thread about bots, poker is a game of incomplete information.

[/ QUOTE ]

And, as someone points out in every single thread about bots, this is irrelevant. The fact that a game has incomplete information has nothing to do with the possibility of writing bots for it that play at a certain level compared to humans. See mine (and others) posts above.

[Sniper]

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The bot may know my tendancies, but once I find out his I'll change my play to react and he won't be able to.

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You highly shortchange the capabilities of computer programming. A Bot with proper opponent modeling, will be able to evaluate your play and adjust accordingly, much faster than you will!

Furthermore, assuming the Bots opponent modeling is based on significant datamining, the Bot will have this advantage over you from day 1.

[Moozh]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Nobody will ever build a program to play poker at the same level programs exist to play chess, because as everyone points out every single thread about bots, poker is a game of incomplete information.

[/ QUOTE ]

And, as someone points out in every single thread about bots, this is irrelevant. The fact that a game has incomplete information has nothing to do with the possibility of writing bots for it that play at a certain level compared to humans. See mine (and others) posts above.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually, it is a significant difference. The reason is that there is a very simple and effective approach to teaching a computer how to play a game with complete information. It is called the min-max algorithm (usually with alpha-beta pruning).

Using this algorithm, you can program a computer to play 'perfectly' as long as it knows the possible moves and the winning conditions of the game. The only factor that prevents the computer from playing perfectly is that the complexity of the analysis grows exponentially with each possible move in the future. Thus, programmers are forced to limit the search depth at some level with an imperfect evaluation function. The deeper a computer can search, the more it can overcome the limitations of its evaluation function. Chess and Go are not solved only because the number of possible moves is too great for a computer to fully compute.

Poker on the other hand is an entirely different beast. Why? Because it's a game of incomplete information. There are adjustments that can be made to min-max for a game of random chance (i.e. Backgammon), but poker involves more than random chance. That's because how a player plays the hand affects the judgement required on that hand (and on future hands too). There just isn't any simple effective algorithm to deal with a problem like that.

That is why the incomplete information issue is a very serious one.

Players 8 and 16 tabling have considerably LESS information than a bot would.