The bots are coming!

[Sleepy Weasel]

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Programs are basically one's and zero's, they can't think for themselves. You can give a program data and have it react a certain way based on that data, but the program will still react the same way given the same data.

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Sorry, I think this is misleading/false. It is true that most programming is in the form, If this, then that, but that is not the only way to write a program. Adaptability is certainly possible.

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To take the next step you would have to give the program some sort of a way to adapt itself to how it has reacted in the "past" and then adapt to that data...etc, etc, etc.

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Artificial life programming techniques, such as genetic algorithms could do this. Forget about trying to encode rules for all possible situation, and think instead about a neural network taking a set of input (pot size, your hand, the board, other players actions, etc...) and producing an output. The network can be trained based solely on performance. Its my understanding that systems of this type often end up learning to be extremely effective at whatever they are being trained to do, and its often very difficult to understand just how they do it.

This is something I've been wanting to play around with for awhile, but lately actually playing and studying poker has taken up most of my spare time, not leaving much for side programming projects. But wouldn't it be fun to generate a population of poker playing bots, let them battle it out until you have a few good ones and then playing against them? Ok, I'm a nerd, sue me.

[HavanaBanana]

I have no doubt that there will be poker bots written that will be winning players.

The cure for this will be for the pokerrooms to have some optical effect that is easy for humans to detect, but that will throw the bots off, some internet sites got this feature allready for passwords so bots will not make billion emailaddresses for instance.

I can see it now, the natural evolution of bots, the better bots beating the other bots into bakruptcy, survival of the fittest indeed.

[Simon Diamond]

I can see it now, the natural evolution of bots, the better bots beating the other bots into bakruptcy, survival of the fittest indeed.

Or, the winner of the WSOP battling the worlds most intelligent bot heads up - a la Kasparov vs X3D Fritz in the chess fraternity.

Simon

[vector]

Define "suck".

I used to play at the Alberta Uni site (forget URL) which was setup by a bunch of people interested in artificial learning and bot programming.

The setup is that you have bots and humans mixed in together playing free money games. Most of the bots were slow, steady long term winners.

Of course the human opposition was often awful. I found it pretty easy to win, although most of my winnings came from the humans not the bots.

Any sweeping statement that bots can never beat humans is at least moderatley likely to be proved utterly false. In fact the bots I played against would easily beat the typical .5-1 player at Party.

People used to believe that computers could never play chess well either. The main difference between programming for chess play vs poker play is that poker is a game of imperfect information, but this is also what makes poker difficult for us humans to master too.

Think of just how robotically you can play and win a low stakes limit game. Sure genetic algorithms and neural net learning is the way to come up with sophisticated, learning bots, but for low stakes games I can program my play into a bunch of simple if statements that would probably do the job.

eg: if AA alwys raise or reraise
if AJ fold to raise, open raise
if four to flush on flop call if have_flush_potodds(pot)
etc

Yes, this type of bot would be predictable and decent players could easily overcome it. But my online play is just as predictable, decent players no doubt can overcome it, yet I make plenty ...

cheers,
vector

PS: playing free money games against mixture of bots and humans was a great way to develop my game, much better than free money games at poker sites consisting only of humans.

[kg99]

haha, that's funny. one can get made fun by a bot...

[AcesFull]

A Canadian software company is selling a commercial version of the U of A's Poki Bot. They have a website at poki-poker.com It would be great if this software version was more challenging than the Turbo Texas holdem profiled opponents. In the backgammon world, there's Jellyfish and Snowie which play at near world-class levels on your home PC. Poker is a game of incomplete information (unlike Chess and Backgammon) so it's magnitudes more difficult to develop a expert level poker player. But I've heard lots of good things about the Poki bot done at the U of A in Canada.

[BreakEvenPlayer]

That's what I was thinking.

Chess is much more complex than poker, and they already have computers that can beat even the best human chess players.

[MrBatman]

The link you forgot is probably:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/

[HavanaBanana]

Paul Talbot started this thread.....

Nanana.... TWILIGHT ZONE!

[MadSci]

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That's what I was thinking.

Chess is much more complex than poker, and they already have computers that can beat even the best human chess players.

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What you do in chess is more complicated than what you do in poker, but the reasons why you do things in poker is WAY more complicated.