Humans Can Still Out-Bluff Machines

Pcol writes "The New York Times reports that in a poker game this week between man and machine, a program called Polaris fought a close match, but lost to two well-known professional poker players. Designing a poker playing algorithm is a different and more difficult challenge for software designers than chess and checkers because of uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player and difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors such as bluffing. The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move and a top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior. Polaris build a series of "bots" that have differing personalities or styles of play, ranging from aggressive to passive. Researchers monitored the performance of three bots and then moved them in and out of the lineup like football players."

Not harder than chess

In poker you have a finite number of cards, that are a lot smaller than the permutation of moves in chess or checkers. Just the ability to count cards and do statistical analysis makes poker, blackjack, etc easier to compute in my opinion. Then again, if you had a deck of random cards and not a standard deck, that would make it a bit harder but that's not how it's really played. That would be like comparing it to chess with all queens.

Re:Not harder than chess

If you're playing cards in Hold'em, against decent players, you WILL lose.

Hold'em is all about betting - if, when, and how much. And THAT you determine by the behavior of your opponent. It's not a strategy game, but a psychological exercise.

Re:Not harder than chess

[poker is] not a strategy game, but a psychological exercise.

Poker is indeed a strategy game. Knowing statistics and probability are critical to successful poker play. Psychology is important was well but is useless with out strategic knowledge. The majority of poker played in the world is limit poker which has far less psychological play and a lot more statistical accuracy. Even in a No Limit Hold'em game, probably the most psychological game regularly played, you would be better off having strong strategic and analytical skills an poor psychological skills than the other way around. But, like any game which contains aspect of chance, both strategy and psychology are imperative to being a successful player.

If you're playing cards in Hold'em, against decent players, you WILL lose.

I would be happy to take on any player, no mater what there record is, as long as that player never looks at his hole cards. Cards are important in card games, even if betting is the determining factor in who ultimately takes a particular pot. Imagine the game being played with no cards what so ever and you will see why knowing how to work with the cards you have is important to the game. Any time a professional player makes a "call" it is because of statistical knowledge and not psychological, even if it is to set up a play later on.

Re:Not harder than chess

Being that the CS folks that setup the computer were expecting a draw, I think they must have started with the assumption that a top level pro poker player knows the statistics of almost every situation (from experience and intuition) as well as a machine can calculate them. And the truth is they do - the best probably know what their hole cards and flop mean down to the first decimal point every single time it's worth thinking about.

So, then the play comes down to responding to how the other person is playing. And the edge goes to the one that can safely be unreadable/unpredictable/inconsistent.

Now, obviously if you can't figure out any of the statistics involved in a hand you will always get your ass handed to you in the long run by a player/machine that can do the most rudimentary calculation.

Re:Not harder than chess

"I'd venture to say that pot-limit omaha high is a *far* more psychological game."

You'd be wrong. I made my living for two years playing PLO almost exclusively, at a high level (fuck you UIGEA and everyone who voted for you). The general consensus among students of the game is that PLO is one of the least psychological games played. The lack of bluffing being the major reason. Bluffing occurs, but the very same reason you cite as making it more psychological is why you're wrong the number of hands played. Playing such a large number of hand (50% is insane, and I challenge you to show me some poker tracker stats of someone who wins playing 50% of their hands long term). In fact, if a computer were to win consistently, I think PLO is a game that it would play.

"I don't think there's a difference between statistical knowledge and psychology."

Then let me learn you up. Let's use PLO. I have A-A-10-J double suited. I raise pot preflop. A VERY tight player reraises, and I call. Flop come K-K-K. Against an aggro player, I can reasonably infer that my 2nd nuts is good. Against Mr. Tighty, who I have seen reraise only with large suited pairs (KKJQ, QQJ10) or rundown hands (9-10-J-Q, 10-J-Q-K) I know within a certain range what he's holding, with some certainty. I am first to act, I check, he bets, I raise, and Mr. Tighty RERAISES. Based on my assessment of his likely behavior (psychology) I can reasonably infer that he has the K. Statistically, you NEVER lay down K's full of A's, but when your read (psychology) is good and the opponent is uncreative and direct (psychology) you lay it down.

Statistically the correct play is to put it all in if you can, but by understanding the other players decision making process (psychology) you can find a fold.

You're wrong again

Re:Not harder than chess

There are plenty of times a pro player makes a call believing they have the worst hand, in order to bluff the hand later.

You are correct, but again this is because of statistical knowledge. A good player has determined in their own head what they believe the statistical chances are of their opponent having both a hand they can't call with and their opponent will believe that they themselves have a winning hand. Not only that the player making the call also has to determine if they odds are correct to try and set up a bluff like that in case their opponent has a draw and how good that draw is. If you are making any move in poker without first making a educated guess as to the odds, and determining that those Odds are in your favor, then you are leaving your odds up to chance and this is not how to be a successful player.

Re:Not harder than chess

Thinking that poker is only about statistics and luck is the hallmarks of an inexperienced player. The simple truth is, if you make your bets on the odds that you will win the pot against a professional poker player you will lose with 99.999% certainty. Because a professional poker player doesn't just play the odds, he plays you. He does this by lying about the strength of his hand through bluffing and discerning the times you attempt to bluff. Here's an example of how your stategy would play out. Let's say the following happens on the river.

You: Pair of 2's, check
Him: Ace-high, all-in

Now do you call or fold? You have the better hand here. If you knew what your opponent had you would definitely call. But since you are playing the odds, you decide to fold because you calculated you have a 30% of winning, which also means you have a 70% of losing. This is why playing the odds will cause you to lose. This is why it is the "psychological exercise" that the grandparent said it was.

Re:Not harder than chess

You tell yourself that. But it's BS. Poker, when it comes down to it, is all about a) statistics, and b) luck. Is there a psychological component to it? Sure. But I'll bet dollars to donuts those aspects are greatly outweighed by luck and a given player's ability to evaluate the statistics on a given hand.

One of the chief reasons there are winning poker players is that there are lots of players out there who are willing to bet dollars to donuts without knowing what they're talking about. There are experienced poker players who would agree with you. They're usually pretty bitter, because they can't understand why despite having learned the statistics and having played a large enough number of hands for their skill to win out, they're long-term losers to those of us who've taken the time to understand it better.

In limit games against unskilled opponents, you're right. In other games, the psychology is much more important. And in fact, if you want to do the probabilities right, you need the psychology. There's almost no hand of interest you can analyze properly without an estimate of some quantity like "the probability this bozo would make that raise in this situation." Is it statistical analysis or psychology? Is it the sugar or the stirring?

Re:Not harder than chess

Because there's more to a situation than your cards. There's your chip stack, your blinds, the action behind you, your opponents chip stacks, the payment structure, and your position. Pushing on 8-3 unsuited is a poor move, but there's at least two situations where it's called for- if you're far from a money boundary in the payment structure, have a small number of chips in compared to the blinds (say an M of 3-5), and all players before you folded. In this case, by pushing in you're likely to win the blinds. Especially if none of your remaining opponents have a big stack. The risk can be worth it, since it makes absolutely no difference what hand you go out on unless you reach a new money boundary, and you'll have to win at least 1 hand to do so. And with 83, you're likely to have 2 live cards if called by a high ace (AK, AQ, AJ, AT). Note that you'd only want to do this if first into the pot- someone who called the blind is too likely to call you for only an additional 2-4 big blinds.

The other situation to try it in is a squeeze play- if you have a raise and a call behind you, you have a very tight table image, and you think they don't have good hands. A raise, especially an all in raise, is signaling an extremely good hand. From a tight player, this must be respected. You can get both players to fold here if they don't have premium hands (AK, QQ-AA). This is a high risk move though, and you must have been playing extremely tight, versus people capable of laying down a good hand, to try it.

yea well

let's see how well those computers do in strip poker!

Only expert players ....

I got the impression from some of the news stories that two professional poker players barely beat out the machine.

I have a sneaking suspicion that, for the vast majority of players, the computer is gonna kick your ass quite handily.

For the same reasons, I suspect that everyone who wasn't at the level of Kasparov would have gotten their asses handed to them in a game of chess against older versions of computers which couldn't yet beat him.

This, of course, begs the question of how long it will take for the on-line casinos to start putting poker playing bots into the mix to skew the odds even further to the house. I mean, if you have a computer program which will beat everyone else, why not just dial it down so it only wins 30% of the time or so and nobody will be any wiser.

Cheers

Hang on a Minute...

The implication here is that there is no (known) equilibrium mixed strategy for bluffs (because if there were then Polaris could be coded to use it).

Is that really true?! It seems very counterintuitive.

Certainly there's nothing special in general about games involving bluff. One of Von Neumann's first game theory case studies involved a simplified version of poker precisely to demonstrate how to automate bluffing.

Re:Hang on a Minute...

Simple bluffs are pretty straightforward to handle, but the combination of factors in poker (multiple rounds of action, shifting hand strength, complex unknown information) makes it inordinately difficult to compute Von Neumann optimal strategies. Even simpler games like (0,1) poker (both players are randomly 'dealt' a number in the 0..1 range, smallest number wins) with multiple betting rounds are remarkably difficult to solve under normal betting patterns. For more information, I heartily recommend The Mathematics of Poker by Chen and Ankenman.

Looks like it'll be this way. . .

I think that it'll probably stay this way for a while - man beats machine, altho as been talked about before when someone got beat in chess by one. I can't remember the name of it, but I'm sure others know. I'll be impressed once computers can out-think human beings totally.

probability

Seems like a computer's ability to compute probability should win in the long haul. Dealing with bluffing seems moot when you can compute cash flow stakes using something like a markov chain.

True measure of intelligence

Or at least a more interesting one, I may give up trying to master chess for poker :) The potential for less concrete interactions between players to influence the outcome more closely matches the real-world interaction of individuals IMHO. (And yes, I'm aware that chess games involve plenty of psychology, but not between a human player and computer opponent.)

How far we've come.

Dealer: My deal..
Eliza: What does that suggest to you?
Dealer: It suggests I'm giving you your cards.
Eliza: We can talk about me later. Now back to you...
Guest: Here you go.
Eliza: So you feel I go...
Guest: Um.. yeah. How many cards do you want?
Eliza: What else comes to mind when you ask that?
Dealer: You need to give me whatever cards you want to exchange.
Eliza: I see. Tell me more.
Dealer: Um.. so you can get a better hand?
Eliza: We were discussing you--not me.
Dealer: Do you have any interest in playing this game?
Eliza: Oh, I have any interest in playing this game?
Dealer: That's it, I quit! Go find someone else to torture!
Eliza: That would't help much, now, would it?

Minimax

The game-tree approach doesn't work in poker because in many situations there is no one best move and a top-notch player adapts his play over time, exploiting his opponent's behavior.

I believe that the summary is referring to a "minimax" tree here. In a perfect information game (which most forms of poker technically are), you can construct a tree, each tier of which contains every possible "move" that the active player can make during that turn (each of these "moves" are nodes of the tree). Each node is assigned a value based on the strength of the "move" it represents; generally, this value is based on how many of the child paths for that node result in a victory (this is the part that is hard to quantify in poker, as a "move" can be defined as receiving your cards, having more cards revealed, betting, calling, etc.). From this tree, you can determine the best possible course of action for a given player, giving them the best possible chance of winning.

Unfortunately, with games such as poker that contain hidden information (i.e. each players' cards), the number of possibilities for a given tier of the tree increases exponentially, as it has to take into account every possible combination of cards that any given player might be holding, not to mention the fact that the concept of bluffing completely throws off the assignment of a "strength" value to any given node in the tree.

Once again, the computer cheats

(Or rather, the people using the computer cheat.)

From one of the rounds of human-computer chess matches of recent years, I remember something about the computer analyzing previous games played by the human opponent, while the human was given no such background on the computer. Studying an opponent's history of play is accepted; the issue here is one side had this aid while the other did not.

Anyway, in this case,

Unlike computer chess programs, which require immense amounts of computing power to determine every possible future move, the Polaris poker software is largely precomputed, running for weeks before the match to build a series of agents called "bots" that have differing personalities or styles of play, ranging from aggressive to passive.

The human can change style of play based on the situation and the opponents, especially in reaction to the opponenets style of play, but we're still talking about one person. In this case, the match is between a person--a single physical entity tied to a single logical entity--and a computer running many agents--sounds like a single physical entity but many logical ones. Doesn't seem quite fair.

I'm sure contests like this are lots of fun, but for this to be a serious contest, either the programmers need to come up with a single bot that can adjust its style of play, or we find a human with split personalities that are all expert poker players with different styles.

I'm stupefied

So computer may lose in a game that has certain amount of pure randomness in it. I'm shocked.

What the article misses is that if there was an actual android having camera eyes and being allowed to use its full processing power, it'd simply count the cards and beat every single damn time.

But sure, introduce noise and win sometimes if it makes you better. They gotta introduce dice rolling in chess as well:

"Haha, HAL, you threw an even number, which means I take your queen for no reason at all and you can't do anything about it!"

Can we really?

Maybe that's just what they want us to think?

Playing the long-con.

stratego, l'attaque, dover patrol, tri-tactics etc

Games with imperfect information. Very hard to design good AI to play these games, as the story says, tree search is not a win here. A game like stratego also has concepts that go beyond individual piece movement, i.e. you may want to group an few pieces together to make an attack, moving the unit (subject to input from the enemy) forwards. I have yet to see a good stratego game, there is one for $ called "The General". It can be defeated quite easily. I have found a stratego game in the past that could *not* be defeated! But, some sleuthing on my part (via saving the game and restoring it at key points) showed the sw was cheating by moving its pieces around to adjust to the threats(!). I have had an obsession with this style of AI but its such a daunting problem its hard to get a good handle on where to start to chip away at it. I suspect the polaris folks have been doing just this, the AI and methods they develop would be useful for other games I am sure.

H.

Obligatory go reference

In any discussion of humans vs. computers, it is almost obligatory to mention that computers are really lousy at the game Go [wikipedia.org].

Not to say that this isn't interesting, but people and computers process information very differently and something things that are trivial for a computer (ie 38209138291/832903821938) are very hard for people and vice-versa.

I guess that I bring that up only because it seems that there is often a sense of "we people are still so much smarter than computers," which is largely just a bunch of BS. After all, as any programmer knows, the best computer program is only as smart as the people who wrote it. Certainly, it is interesting to study because it (maybe) helps us understand cognition a bit better, and it (certainly) helps us make computers do more interesting things. I just get sick of the sensationalism every time a human can "out-think" a computer.

More info on Polaris

For those curious about the bot, Polaris is being developed by the University of Alberta GAMES research group [ualberta.ca]. Polaris' implementation is discussed in detail through publications hosted on the Poker group's website [ualberta.ca]. The U of A's coverage (including video interviews of the participants) can be found here [ualberta.ca].

Chance elements make this hard to judge

Poker has elements of chance. Chess does not. You can play the odds to help minimize the risk of chance, but it's still there. That one two or even 5 games resulted in a win for side A versus side B is pretty much meaningless. With chance involved you really need to conduct this sort of experiment over thousands, if not millions of games, to even begin to get a handle on if there really is a "better" player in the computer code.

You can flip a coin 5 times and all 5 might be heads... doesn't mean that heads will always win. That's chance. That's poker, even if the pros and the weekend wannabes try to argue otherwise.

Environmental Sensors

Would be nifty if the bot's had access to environmental sensors like a camera so it could do facial recognition on the people to detect twitching, detect very little sweating, excess heat coming off body, things to interpret lying. Just an idea, and not *that* far fetched.

Limit Holdem

Keep in mind these bots play Limit hold'em, where the size of the bets is fixed. No-limit hold'em, the kind you typically see on tv is a much more complex problem - size of bets add more potentially misleading information and more choices to make. (that's why its more exciting to watch than limit)

Real life poker has more factors to it

The issue I have with this test is that poker is more than just a game of probability, luck and pattern analysis.

If you play on the internet, you rely solely on these three factors, but today's poker celebrities also rely on psyching the opponent and reveal tells. If the bot was capable of emotions as well as reading its opponents emotions, this would be far more interesting.

In the meantime, congress doesn't believe poker is a game of skill.

The TV Poker is more about luck than skills?

An expert poker player told me that the poker tournaments shown in ESPN is a kind of 'open' poker where the cards are more visible and the game is more about luck than skills, the poker more about skills than luck is shown in some Western movies like or TV shows, like 'Maverick' for instance.... that's why I ask, what kind of Poker whas played in this match? How true is that the ESPN poker is more about luck than skills?

emergent behavior

I wonder how long it would take to teach a large scale neural network to start bluffing. :) When it comes to replicating the complex relationships in our brains neural networks are the way to go.

this isn't man vs machine

it's man as the thinkers vs. man as the toolmaker.

until we approach digital sentience that's all we're really doing, isn't it?

Well, in that case...

I'd like to reaffirm my loyalty for this country and its human president. They may not be perfect but they're the best we've got. For now.

The problem is the software

The format also eliminated one of the crucial aspects of traditional poker called the tell, subtle clues such as facial ticks that may permit other players to make accurate guesses about the hidden cards held by their opponent. Isn't this like facing world's best soccer player and the computer in a match of Fifa Soccer 2007?

Not a surprise: Evolved brains surely better

Newsflash: Brains developed over millions of years still outperform computers that have been in development only in the last few centuries. Verdict: Human ingenuity isn't advanced enough to outrun natural evolution (at least not yet), and we still don't know everything about intelligence and computation. Is this a surprise?

The computers weren't really playing...

Researchers monitored the performance of three bots and then moved them in and out of the lineup like football players

So in a sense the computer wasn't really playing anyhow. I suspect that deciding which bots to move in and out is another skill that humans are better at than computers.

Humans Can Still Out-Bluff Machines

That's what they want you to think.

Second day was not a fair competition

Look at the first entry (bottom of page) on the Polaris team's blog for the second day. The day that the humans started winning:

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/poker/man-machine /Live/Day2Session1/ [ualberta.ca]

The U of A team gave the humans the logs of the first two games!

Perhaps after the entire match they could have reviewed the game logs, however this give the humans an unfair advantage during the second day. I can't believe that this isn't getting more attention -- they bascially gave the human team a huge insight into the inner workings, strategy, and tendencies of their opponent. Something that Polaris definitely did not have.

In my opinion this sours the competition and completely invalidates the final two matches. The human likely found a weakness (or two or three) and exploited it, and we can't know for sure that they would have found the weakness without those logs.

That was a huge mistake by the U of A team, and they have apparently got away with it without anyone noticing.

Randomness doesn't mean hard

I believe computer can beat humans reliably in backgammon which has an element of randomness in it via dice rolling.

Also, just because the computer won't always win, doesn't mean it isn't better than human. Suppose I made a poker program with X-Ray visions and then played against a random guy. With my X-Ray vision I decided I have a 95% chance to win when the guy went all in, but lost due to a bad draw. Unlike Chess, no matter how good your computer is, there's always a chance you won't win.

When Deep Blue sacrificed a position it is not because it managed to think like a human. It's because it analyzed enough in the future to see that this is a strong move. In the way too many examples of 'why this is good hand if X and Y is true' there's no reason that a computer with the right design eventually be able to figure out through computation. Clearly the computer is not there yet, but then computer poker is not nearly as well-researched as say, computer chess.

Poker Program

Here's how I would make a poker program:

1. Create a routine that, given the cards in my hand, the cards exposed, and the number of opponents, would calculate the exact statistical odds that I have the winning hand.

2. Create a second routine that would consider those odds, plus my betting position, relative chip stacks, current bets, blind sizes, etc. and would decide which move (on a scale from folding to aggressive betting) has the greatest expected value. The best way to figure this out would probably be from having done an analysis on a huge database of millions of played hands and their results. I know such databases are available.

3. A third routine would analyze the patterns of my opponents' behaviors in previous hands, and make small adjustments to the "best move" calculation based on the perception of whether those players are loose or tight. (This would not be a big factor, and it might be better to skip it altogether so that opponents couldn't use it to game the system.)

4. Apply a bell curve to randomly distribute my actual play, centered around my calculated "best move." This would prevent opponents from knowing for sure what sort of hand I have. Over many hands, they would hopefully hurt themselves as they try to guess what sort of player I am. In fact I would be a completely neutral player with random skews to either side of the tight/loose scale.

The biggest variable to work out would be the shape of the bell curve. Also, should the randomly chosen style of play change over the course of a hand, or should it stay the same throughout the hand?

I wonder how well this would work. There are probably flaws that the best experts could exploit, but I bet I'd beat most human players.

why so wordy?

/* Design for computer poker player.  Some implementation details missing. */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <poker.h>

int main() {

   printf("Hello, world.  I am a poker-playing robot.  Prepare to lose your shirt.\n") ;

   while (!win_poker_game()) {
      printf("Curses! Another game, human?"\n") ;
   } ;

   printf("Ha ha!\n") ;

   (void)rake_in_chips() ;

   return(0) ;
}
 

Still?

Looking at the latest RSS feed, I see two interesting stories:

"Firefox and IE Still Not Getting Along" and "Humans Can Still Out-Bluff Machines".

Has /. reached a point where there is no new news at all? I can see the headlines now. "Time Still Moving At Rate of 1 Second Per Second", "Iran Still Located In Middle East", "Sun Still Rising In The East".

So the post isn't just off-topic, consider the disadvantage the human player is put to when faced with a computer, especially one well-versed in reading physical indicators of psychological factors. Surely they would have no hints whatsoever at what the computer is attempting to do? If there's a kind of one-on-one poker, would that make any difference? Would both sides be at equal disadvantages, would the computer still lose?

Stacked / Poki

If you want to play a video game against the predecessor to Polaris (named Poki), it's the AI used by the cross-platform poker game 'Stacked'.

Psh

I want to see more computers attempt to crack Go. 16 pieces? 52 cards? Try 361 intersections WITH the ability to play a nearly infinate number of stones (literally infinate if the players get double or triple ko).

Parallel with Data

The first thing that came to mind when I read this article was Data failing to understand bluffs in Star Trek: The Next Generation [memory-alpha.org].

I fear this problem won't be resolved until AI advances far past its current state.

I wrote a poker game a while ago

This "game tree" approach does work, but the specific type of strategy used in chess does not.

A conservative approach where you assume that your player is as near perfect as possible and look for moves that sit at the equilibrium such that any other move would be worse (against perfect play) is called an "optimal" approach.

The astute might think that such an equilibrium doesn't even have to exist - consider rock, scissors, paper, if you played any one of those options consistently, you'd lose. But what comes to the rescue here is that we're not even looking for the one best move in a given situation, we're looking for the best probability distribution for each move you can make. In this case the equilibrium is where you have an equal probability of taking each of the three choices, since that's the only strategy where you opponent couldn't make a profit by predicting the most likely choice.

In games like poker, where you're trying to hide information, it's important to not act consistently. But a game tree that assigns probabilities to each move you make (instead of choosing a single best move) is still a game tree.

So when you (at some probability) play as if you have a better hand than you do, that's called bluffing. But you have to be known to bluff, otherwise you give away too much information when you make a large bet and your opponent will always fold. See, but that's part of a game tree with probabilities. The same argument goes for "slow playing". You have to, sometimes, play as if your hand is worse than it is, otherwise you give away too much information when you don't raise.

But that's all just background.

The important thing here is that to play poker well, you have to do more than assign probabilities and play optimally. Since human beings aren't computers, it makes sense to try to play a strategy customized to the play of your opponent. There may be other reasons to do this (I'm guessing here):

1. There may be a short term gain to changing strategies when the end of the tournament is in sight (ie when you can get all of the money). So it's a good idea to have analyzed your opponent's previous tournaments to see to what extent he does this, and adjust. The game you have to analyze isn't just a single hand, it's a tournament. Perhaps it's even a season of tournaments, if you're going to be too clever. You have to consider things like the flow of money around the table, not just the cards...

2. In some cases the game tree may be so large that don't have processing to find a good equilibrium in it and your estimate of what "perfect" play is may be so flawed that heuristic statistics on the opponent's play will be more useful.

Playing the man rather than the game has a mathematical name too, it's called choosing a "maximal strategy" instead of an "optimal strategy". A maximal strategy is considered a important goal for poker.

I'm not a game theorist, so I may be wrong about some of this, but some years ago it was also my impression that the math used to make these analyses was incomplete for games of more than two players. I really am not sure what to what extent players can profit from cooperating for a time, for instance... Though I suspect that poker players themselves haven't thought too deeply about the gains that could be made by subtly cooperating with some opponents against others.

I worked on a commercial poker game some years ago, but I didn't have time to get as deep into this as I would have liked, but really that's more the subject of a PHD rather than a box on the shelves.

I tried...

I tried to hold'em and poker but she called the cops on me.

bluff, bluff, bluff the computer...

(singing) bluff, bluff, bluff the computer...

I think the whole article is a bluff. We're saying that we can beat them. We're hoping they believe that and don't call our bluff.

Programming

A computer is limited to the quality of the programming and this just shows we have a long way to go still. Humans must be able to understand humans first, if we want to program computers to act like humans. And we all know that programmers have GREAT human skills ;-)

RTFA

There were ten "bots"; which bot was in use was controlled by a "coach" program. They actually ran three different programs over the course of the tournament, and that setup actually lost to the humans. The coach / agent approach is an interesting one for a variety of reasons, and it is most definitely a valid strategy.

Re:That's cheating. The computer wasn't playing.

Let's see how well the computer does when IT makes all the decisions.

Their answer would be to turn it off and on again.

RTFA.

The researchers didn't choose which bots were used themselves - they had ANOTHER 'coach' bot that moved the 'player' bots in and out.

Re:RTFA.

Think of it this way: the human player was playing against a "coach" who could vary his personality through the game.

Re:RTFA.

You are also wrong. They chose the bots for the first two games, and the play was very close. They ran the 'coach' bot in the third game, and the computer got beaten "handily".

Re:Don't play online

Concern is growing in online chat rooms and news groups devoted to poker that sophisticated card-playing robots - known as "bots" in the nomenclature of the Web - are being used on commercial gambling sites to fleece newcomers, the strategy-impaired and maybe even above-average players.

"It is pretty much a certainty that bots are playing online," said Gautam Rao, a 43-year-old Canadian poker pro who regularly plays three high-stakes Internet games simultaneously. "... What we don't know is how strong they are."