Friday, January 9, 2015

Computers with headphones and sun glasses?

When reading The Wall Street Journal today, I turned to page two and saw this headline:

Computer Program as Poker Champ? Don't Bet Against It

You can "bet" that it caught my attention.

Here is an excerpt:

"In their work announced Thursday, researchers led by Michael Bowling at Canada’s University of Alberta Computer Poker Research Group in Edmonton tackled a two-player variant of that game called “heads-up limit hold ’em” in which the size of bets and the number of rounds of play during each hand are fixed. It is the simplest version of the game that people usually play. Scientists are still working to solve more complex variations of the poker game."

You can read more about it here.

4 comments:

  1. If I played poker it would need to be fixed! :)

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  2. Can't read the article as I am not a WSJ subscriber. However, it seems to me that it would not be terribly difficult to program in the data/statistics for heads up play (for people who know what they are doing, of course). But somehow addressing the complexity of bluffing, third and fourth level thinking, etc? I dunno.

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  3. An interesting development, with some of the protagonists currently participating in a thread on 2+2.

    As a side note, I find that the WSJ makes for a very efficient bed covering during the cold Vegas winters.

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  4. It uses game theory and a huge database that needs a lot of horspower. It tries to store all the permutations there are which is a huge undertaking. You can read about it here:
    http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/01/computers-used-to-solve-two-person-limit-texas-holdem/

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