Bots - quote from a chessmaster to discuss

[itsmarty]

[ QUOTE ]
After decades of development, chess bots reached parity with the best human players.
If even 1% of funding devoted to chess expert systems went into poker expert system, it would be capable of beating world class poker players.

[/ QUOTE ]

People always behave as if chess and poker are the only games people want to beat with computers. Significant effort has gone into Go programs as well, with only marginal success.

Martin

[Rudbaeck]

Bots will most likely totally dominate humans heads-up in a not too distant future in both limit and no limit texas hold'em. Because that game is completely soluble using game theory.

Now as soon as you add a third player it's not been shown that it's soluble. For full ring the problem is even worse.

In the long run I think there will be bots that play better than most strategy forum regulars here do. If they will in fact be able to beat the best in the world is less certain.

And a bot that can both beat Doyle at a full table and at the same time extract more from the fish than he does is probably way further off than a manned mission to Mars.

The problem is that the math to solve multiplayer non-cooperative partial-information games doesn't exist other than in embryonic form today. So any implementation of said math is even further off.

[Innocentius]

[ QUOTE ]

The problem is that the math to solve multiplayer non-cooperative partial-information games doesn't exist other than in embryonic form today. So any implementation of said math is even further off.

[/ QUOTE ]

I liked your post, and agree with most of what you wrote. But the fact that the math to completely solve the games isn't there does not in itself mean that it's impossible to write a very good bot. Chess isn't solved either. The best engines are all heuristic based, and I don't see any obvious reason why this wouldn't work for poker. (Observe that I'm not saying that it will certainly work, only that I am not convinced that it cannot work.)

[greygoo]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
After decades of development, chess bots reached parity with the best human players.
If even 1% of funding devoted to chess expert systems went into poker expert system, it would be capable of beating world class poker players.

[/ QUOTE ]

People always behave as if chess and poker are the only games people want to beat with computers. Significant effort has gone into Go programs as well, with only marginal success.

Martin

[/ QUOTE ]
The problem with Go is that there are just way more variantions plus the fact that stones can leave and then reappear on the board. Plus evaluation function is harder there, but computers ill get there, trust me. And there is no dispute that chess program research by far had way more attention through the years.

Chess programs don't outplay humans in terms of strategy, pressure or understanding of the game. Their evaluation function and computing capabilities, coupled with openings book and table-bases, just present human player with a problems he is incapable to solve most of the times. He makes a subtle mistakes, computer capitalize on that. Computers don't know [censored] about chess and they don't need to.

It's only a matter of time an effort, before it happens with such a simple game as poker. You don't need to know what human is thinking. You just create a model, sofisticated enough that human would be incapable of figuring out, therefore he would not be able to play optimally against it.

Computers will always surpass humans in competitions within limited context. Only a matter of time and complexity of context.