« Stumbling on Happiness, II: Are Asians less happy? | Main | Where does talent come from? »
von Neumann's poker-playing machine
Here is Tim Harford's article on poker and game theory, from today's Financial Times. Excerpt:
...he admits that it is only a matter of time before anyone will be able to download a free poker robot that will outplay the world champion. At that point, people may not care to risk money online against unidentified opponents.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 6, 2006 at 07:26 AM in Science | Permalink
Comments
This actually already exists. I had a friend in college who would play 4 screens at once against mediocre players - made a good bit of money at it too. We got to talking about this exact issue and he stated that it was already in existance and was pretty simple actually (don't know much about poker, but I assume it's just a probability engine tied to an executable). The major websites put a lot of effort into detecting whether or not programs are actually sitting behind avatars.
I think what's even more fascinating about it is that eventually, you might get to a point where we'll just have the programs playing against each other.
Posted by: Alex Ambroz at May 6, 2006 10:12:42 AM
Tyler quoted Harford paraphrasing Darse Billings saying that one day (and presumably thereafter) in online poker the best robot will beat the world champion. No one is claiming that robots will be supreme face to face. As for the the online claim, it is a little fuzzy. Does "best robot" mean a final and definitive best robot, as can be approximated (I believe) in chess? If so, I am pretty sure that the claim is wrong. My hunch is that humans privy to the robot will transcend it and then beat it. If anyone is suggesting that a definitive poker robot can be created and prevail eternally, even in strictly online play, I think she's wrong. If "best robot" has at t subscript on it and means best today, maybe it can beat the world champion today, but not tomorrow . . .
Posted by: Daniel Klein at May 6, 2006 11:32:22 AM
I suspect there are already robots that are good enough to earn a positive return in online play. Though online card rooms claim to fight robots, their incentive is chiefly to appear vigilant against robots -- not to actually be vigilant.
A good robot is no worse for card room revenues than a good human player, and could actually help revenues, by raising total betting volume. There's a reason why casinos and card rooms use shills to keep games going. A robot who plays at a monetary break-even level (exclusive of table fees) could be a perfect shill.
I would even worry about room operators selling bulk hand data to robot operators. Even if anonymized, so that robots don't have perfect records of other exact players' tendencies, this data could give robot operators unparalleled insight into what strategies, on average, generate positive returns given different actual populations of players.
I suspect robot operators would pay a lot for for this data; the countervailing incentives for room operators not to sell would be (1) the risk their reputation could be sullied by if such collusion with one class of players was discovered; and (2) the long-term risk that players would become discouraged from wagering by always being beaten by better-informed opponents. Yet the willingness of people to play games with guaranteed negative returns suggests (2), at least, would be far fram fatal to card rooms' businesses.
If Levitt's out-in-the-open Pokernomics has any hope of generating useful results from mass data, secretive syndicates have probably already managed the same.
Posted by: Gordon Mohr at May 6, 2006 5:04:48 PM
As soon as it is circulated, a table that gives optimal strategy based on past patterns of behavior would start to break down. ("Reflexivity" as Soros would say) ...
From a peripherally related discussion in Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground":
[Science itself will teach man ... that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature ... All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index ...
Then--this is all what you say--new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided ...
I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden ... a gentleman with an ignoble ... countenance were to arise and ... say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" ... ]
Posted by: John D. at May 6, 2006 7:41:29 PM
"Tyler quoted Harford paraphrasing Darse Billings saying that one day (and presumably thereafter) in online poker the best robot will beat the world champion. No one is claiming that robots will be supreme face to face."
Uhm, yes there are in fact loads of people claiming that. Maybe you mean something along the lines of "the best exploiter of poor human opponents in a live setting will always be human". And maybe you're right about that.
The claim "the best computers will be able to beat the best humans in 1-on-1 games regardless of setting better than any human" certainly has been made, and in my opinion pretty much is a lock. Tnis is because tells based on physical appearances are of very little value against expert opponents who simply don't get very excited about pulling a huge bluff or having a lock on the pot. Been there, done that and thrown away the tacky t-shirt.
Possibly there is some validity to the claim "the best performer against an expert human during very long sessions in a live setting will be human" due to the fact that some humans might be better exploiters of exhausted expert players. But I'd would think that the computers complete lack of exhaustion for any time period would well compensate for not being able to extract every last bit of value from an exhausted expert.
As for the existence of programs playing online with a positive expectation, they already are (and yes, I do know of specific examples). And it's not that much of a challenge due to the vast masses of incredibly poor players playing online. I'm pretty sure I could, with a rubber hose and a sufficient supply of bananas, teach a chimp to beat the low limit online games. The quality of play is simply appalling. Of course, beating the higher stakes games is a lot more difficult due to the generally stronger opponents.
As for hand history data, they already are publicly available in that any observer can pull up any game and watch. I download around 5mb of data a day using a fairly unsophisticated program and I'm sure someone who wanted to fairly easily could access far larger volumes than that with a bit of ingenuity.
There's also the *huge* issue of collusive strategies which, while cheating, are very hard to detect. I believe that programs utilizing those kind of techniques could beat the very best players today fairly easily if working in a 2-against-1 setting. I'd expect those sort of bots to become a lot more common, and they would be unbeatable unless countered with the same kind of techniques.
Obviously a two-player optimal strategy does not break down once it's know. It's kind of the point of an optimal strategy.
The point about the appearance of stopping cheating being more important that actually stopping cheating is right on the money though. Card room operators usually claim that they can't disclose their procedures due to security reasons, but I know of quite a few cases of incredibly blatant cheating that hasn't been detected. Customers, cheaters included, are incredibly valueble (I paid something like $10k in fees last month and $1k is very common) to the game operators and they're very reluctant to lose any of them.
For the record, I *am* a professional poker player. Though I don't play one on TV, so don't expect to know who I am.
Posted by: John Forsberg at May 6, 2006 8:13:53 PM
"each decision at the table will have an answer that is known to be correct"
This is true only if the "answer" includes probabilities. In other words the correct answer could be to raise exactly X exactly 60% of the time and just call exactly 40% of the time.
The nature of the private information in poker and game theory precludes all 100% answers to every situation.
Posted by: BillWallace at May 6, 2006 11:32:48 PM
"The nature of the private information in poker and game theory precludes all 100% answers to every situation."
No it does not.
A trivial example is when checked to on the last street of betting when you hold a hand that cannot be beat and is last to act. You bet 100% of the time, no exceptions. Those sort of situations are not that uncommon really. Especially not in a 2-player game.
Further, there are lots of solutions to poker games that include very little or no mixed strategies. Instead you mask your hand strength by playing different hands the same way. Eg betting the top X% and bottom Y% of your hands at the last round of betting when checked to.
I even think there might be some proof that there needs to be *no* mixing in any 2 player poker game, though I'm not at all sure about that. If there is, it has to do with solving linear equations. At the least it's possible to confine mixing to a few key hands.
Here is a link to a fairly simple, hold'em-like game solved by Alex Selby for those interested: http://www.archduke.demon.co.uk/simplex/index.html
If you take a look, you'll notice that one of the solutions he presents only uses a mixed strategy for 42/1326 hands.
Posted by: John Forsberg at May 7, 2006 2:03:17 AM
This may be me just being stupid due to sleep deprivation. But I'm having trouble parsing "precludes all 100% answers to every situation."
Does it mean "there are no situations without mixing" or "there must be some situations with mixing"?
Sorry if I jumped the gun in thinking of your statement in the first sense.
Posted by: John Forsberg at May 7, 2006 2:07:47 AM
There must be some situations with mixing.... Not all.
Obviously some situations are 100%.
I'm almost certain the optimal heads up limit solution would include mixing.
Posted by: BillWallace at May 7, 2006 4:37:00 AM
That a game is solved doesn't mean you can't still have fun with it (although I for one would like seeing an end to the online poker craze).
There's an interesting computer competition in rock-scissors-papers. Now everyone knows that the optimal strategy is choosing at random, but that won't win that competition, it will only land you in the middle. To win, your program has to recognise competitor programs with poor strategies, figure out what those strategies are, and respond in a way that is better than selecting at random.
And why would people write programs that perform worse than random? Because they are trying to do write better ones... Rather amusing competition.
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsbpc.html
Posted by: Harald Korneliussen at May 8, 2006 6:41:51 AM
sympatiek lesbisch ^^^ beroemd grietje ^^^ fantasticamente fighetta ^^^ farcical fighette ^^^ le plus chaud amical vierge ^^^ au lit mariee ^^^ mman seins ^^^ chaud maman climat ^^^ good giovane dildo ^^^ desiderio fighette gruppo ^^^ lojlig sjukskoterska ejakulation ^^^ langta efter lesbisk gruppen ^^^ divertente cameriera spogliarello ^^^ fun giovane spogliarello ^^^ clitoris enormes spritzen ^^^ absurd bukkake ^^^ huora wwwmuuraus masturbating ^^^ vaasa pornofilmi peraaukon ^^^ uvanlig foto ^^^ varm kuse ^^^ i omorfoteri nosokoma striptiz ^^^ efsiniditos geladarisa agapi ^^^ maman tv ^^^ suedoise trente quatre ^^^ pio kryo tolmiros mama ^^^ to pio kryo tolmiros mama ^^^
Posted by: levan at Sep 8, 2006 4:23:02 AM
Hello all really cool blog
alprazolam drug fioricet drug hydrocodone drug vicodin drug tramadol drug xanax drug valium drug ultram drug soma drug carisoprodol drug ambien drug ativan drug lorazepam drug propecia drug adipex drug didrex drug cialis drug levitra drug paxil drug meridia drug viagra drug wellbutrin drug clonazepam drug xenical drug prozac drug butalbital drug phentermine drug
buy cheap ativan online buy cheap adipex online buy cheap didrex online buy cheap levitra online buy cheap cialis online buy cheap phentermine online buy cheap soma online buy cheap tramadol online buy cheap diazepam online buy cheap carisoprodol online buy cheap meridia online buy cheap paxil online buy cheap valium online buy cheap xanax online buy cheap ultram online buy cheap fioricet online buy cheap tooth whitening buy best online pharmacy generic alprazolam online buy best car insurance buy best payday loan search web directory search business directory buy carisoprodol buy hydrocodone cheap vicodin
Posted by: linda at Oct 9, 2006 9:45:46 AM
Tiffany Replica Jewelry/a>
Links of London Jewelry
Replica Links of London Jewelry
Links of London Replica Jewelry
Posted by: aion kina at Mar 20, 2009 9:41:55 PM
