Live data from Hacker News

No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

nature.com

171–180 of 407 posts

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#171

I'm one of the authors of the bot, AMA

I haven't finished digging through the paper and the supplement yet, but I'm curious about how many hands were multiway to the flop (and whether the percentages differ significantly between 1H/5AI and 5H/1AI). I'd guess that it's a pretty small fraction of the total hands, and I'm wondering what the performance is like in those particular cases.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So will this be the end of online poker?

It must be. It is way too hard to prevent humans from using an AI. Some chess services try to check if you're playing "too perfect", but in poker that's harder to do, and there's way more money on the line.

>Some chess services try to check if you're playing "too perfect" [...]

That's interesting, could you share an example? Most of my search results are anecdotal Reddit threads about how many people cheat in online chess.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#173
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same logic can apply to flop donk bets. Some flops favor the donking player's range more than their opponent.

Yea I'm not saying it's impossible to devise an unexploitable flop donking strategy. I think the reason thinking players generally don't is because of the complexity of adding significantly more branches early in the game tree - basically going from 3 (check-{fold,call,raise}) to 6 (those 3 plus donk-{fold,call,raise}).

The other issue is that increasing the number of branches also decreases the number of hands that go into each bucket, to the point where it might not be effective any more without being able to randomize the branch choice for specific threshold hands. Most pros I know just have a hard cutoff for each branch and don't worry too much if they're slightly out of balance, but smaller bucket sizes could magnify errors. If you have 31 combos for one action when you're supposed to have 30.5, then whatever, but if you have 6 when it should be 5.5, that could become a problem faster.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#174
post #171

I'm one of the authors of the bot, AMA

I haven't finished digging through the paper and the supplement yet, but I'm curious about how many hands were multiway to the flop (and whether the percentages differ significantly between 1H/5AI and 5H/1AI). I'd guess that it's a pretty small fraction of the total hands, and I'm wondering what the performance is like in those particular cases.

I don't have the exact percentages but I think it's less than 10%. It's not really possible to measure the bot's performance just in specific situations, but my feeling is the bot performs relatively well in these situations. Multi-way flops were basically impossible to do in a reasonable amount of time for past AI's. Our new search techniques make these situations feasible to figure out in seconds.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#175

I'm one of the authors of the bot, AMA

Can you share more details about the abstraction? The paper is kind of vague on it. How does it decide if it should use 1 or 14 bet values? Is it a perfect recall abstraction? How many information sets are there?

We give more details on this in the supplementary material.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#176
post #168

I'm one of the authors of the bot, AMA

In your Science paper, you mention playing 1H-5AI against 2 human players: Chris Ferguson and Darren Elias. In your blog post you also mention playing 1H-5AI against Linus Loelinger, who was within standard error of even money. Why did Linus not make it into the Science paper?

That took place after the final version of the Science paper was submitted. It would have been nice to include but it takes a while to do those experiments and we didn't feel it was worth delaying the publication process for it.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#177
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't finished digging through the paper and the supplement yet, but I'm curious about how many hands were multiway to the flop (and whether the percentages differ significantly between 1H/5AI and 5H/1AI). I'd guess that it's a pretty small fraction of the total hands, and I'm wondering what the performance is like in those particular cases.

I don't have the exact percentages but I think it's less than 10%. It's not really possible to measure the bot's performance just in specific situations, but my feeling is the bot performs relatively well in these situations. Multi-way flops were basically impossible to do in a reasonable amount of time for past AI's. Our new search techniques make these situations feasible to figure out in seconds.

Cheers, thanks. One of the reasons I asked about 1H/5AI vs 5H/1AI is that historically the new bots for a given form of poker have played a bit wider than the accepted wisdom of the time, so I was curious if there were relatively more multiway pots with 5AI than with 5H.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#178

I'm one of the authors of the bot, AMA

The bot does not seem to consider previous hands in its decisions. That is to say, it does not consider who it is playing against. Should this affect how we perceive the bot as “strategic” or not? Bots that play purely mathematically optimally on expected value aren’t effective or interesting. But it feels like this is playing on just a much higher order expected value. It feels like a more down to earth version of t…

The bot bluffs, and understands that when its opponent bets it might be a bluff. I would consider that to be strategic behavior. The fact that its strategy is determined by a mathematical process doesn't change that in my opinion.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#179
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have the exact percentages but I think it's less than 10%. It's not really possible to measure the bot's performance just in specific situations, but my feeling is the bot performs relatively well in these situations. Multi-way flops were basically impossible to do in a reasonable amount of time for past AI's. Our new search techniques make these situations feasible to figure out in seconds.

Cheers, thanks. One of the reasons I asked about 1H/5AI vs 5H/1AI is that historically the new bots for a given form of poker have played a bit wider than the accepted wisdom of the time, so I was curious if there were relatively more multiway pots with 5AI than with 5H.

The pros described the bot's preflop strategy as very sensible, so I think it's unlikely there were more multiway pots with 5 AI's.

Re: No limit: AI poker bot is first to beat professionals at multiplayer game

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be hard for the pros to find exploits against the bot, but they could definitely lose less. When using solvers, pros generally only input a couple of sizings for bets, and avoid 2x+ pot sizings, which from the video it seemed like the bot used at much higher frequencies than other pros.

I'm not great at poker, but I did play a decent amount and I know a lot of my strategy involves probing for other people's weaknesses and shifting my strategy mid game to throw people off. I feel like a lot of trained ML models have a lot laughable weaknesses, but perhaps they've been trained on every game they're well prepared for any tomfoolery.

The bot is trained to play Game Theory Optimal, aka it's playing to be breakeven at worst, which is why I believe it would be hard for a human to beat it. It's not playing perfectly, but the edges it's giving up is so marginal to perfect play that a human is going to lose simply by making a mistake at some point, even if a human were to use a solver to completely optimize their strategy.
Post reply on HN