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

> High level strategic play of most games is about adapting to your opponents play.

Is this true in any meaningful sense?

For heavily studied games there's usually a theoretically optimal play independent of the opponent's interior state, this is obviously true for all the "Solved" games, which includes the simpler Heads Up Limit Hold 'Em poker (solved by Alberta's Cepheus project) but it seem pretty clearly true for as-yet unsolved games like Go and Chess too.

I'm very impressed by this achievement because I had expected good multi-player poker AI (as opposed to simple colluding bots found online making money today) to be some years away. But I would not expect "adaptability" to ever be a sensible way forward for winning a single strategy game.

Like already stated, saying that Alpha Zero has forced the chess world to seriously reconsider the basic principles of chess openings etc. is a bit of a stretch. But interestingly enough, the current world champion (Magnus Carlsen) is having the chess streak of his life as we speak. On the side, he's been openly joking about Alpha Zero being one of his biggest chess idols. It's safe to say the streak is probably mostly related to his preparation from the last world championship match half a year ago carrying over to all the tournaments after.

However, even according to the former world champion (Viswanathan Anand) the run he's been on is something quite shocking: “His results this year is simply [great].... difficult to find words. [It’s been] completely off the charts. I think the chess world is still in a bit of a shock. The rest of the players are struggling to deal with a phenomenon [like him]. Even in 2012-13, his domination was less than it is this year. Everyone is still processing this information.” [1]

Carlsen is basically on route to breaking 2900 Elo - at 2882 Elo with a clear upwards trend - while there's only two other active players even above 2800 Elo and struggling to keep it above that treshold. (Elo is the rating system used in chess. Above 1500 Elo is an average player, 2000 Elo is a good player, 2500 Elo is a grandmaster. Anything above 2700 Elo is basically godlike.)

Oddly enough, instead of playing more like a machine, it seems like Carlsen has been playing chess that is much more about the human aspect of the game rather than trying to find the top ranked engine move on every turn. (The current traditional top engine - Stockfish - makes an assumption of each move's validity using a point system, which the chess world has been more or less obsessing over for the past decade. Alpha Zero doesn't have such a point system whatsoever.) He's been playing a drastically more aggressive and dynamic variety of chess compared to what has been seen in a long time at the top tournaments.

He's been playing to create dizzying positions on the board, making a few moves that aren't necessarily liked by the traditional top engines, but still finding himself in a winning position several moves after. It definitely looks like some sort of black magic, but it seems like the big thing Alpha Zero has brought to the general philosophy on how to approach chess at the top level is that it's possible to play aggressive chess, take risks and win in 2019. Magnus Carlsen is the first player to successfully reinvent that style of play, more than likely partly inspired by Alpha Zero. So, I'd say the big thing about Alpha Zero isn't necessarily that it could beat the other top engines, but more importantly that the 'artistic' aspect of its play is something that has never been seen from another chess engine. The fact that it proved that sort of style superior to the play ever before played by another chess engine is just the icing on the cake.

Garry Kasparov on Alpha Zero's chess persona: "I admit that I was pleased to see that AlphaZero had a dynamic, open style like my own. The conventional wisdom was that machines would approach perfection with endless dry maneuvering, usually leading to drawn games. But in my observation, AlphaZero prioritizes piece activity over material, preferring positions that to my eye looked risky and aggressive." [2]

[1] https://sportstar.thehindu.com/chess/viswanathan-anand-on-ma... [2] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1087

Not normally distributed, as negative reaction times are unlikely. You could use log-normal, but I believe that a mixture of exponential and gamma tends to be used by reaction time researchers (search ExpGamma).

>10,000 hands in an interesting number. If you search the poker forums, you'll see this is the number you'll see people throw out there for how many hands you need to see before you can analyze your play. You then make adjustments and see another 10,000 hands before you can assess those changes.

If you read the paper/facebook post[0] (no idea why this worse article is the link here) - you'll see they address this.

>Although poker is a game of skill, there is an extremely large luck component as well. It is common for top professionals to lose money even over the course of 10,000 hands of poker simply because of bad luck. To reduce the role of luck, we used a version of the AIVAT variance reduction algorithm, which applies a baseline estimate of the value of each situation to reduce variance while still keeping the samples unbiased. For example, if the bot is dealt a really strong hand, AIVAT will subtract a baseline value from its winnings to counter the good luck. This adjustment allowed us to achieve statistically significant results with roughly 10x fewer hands than would normally be needed.

0. https://ai.facebook.com/blog/pluribus-first-ai-to-beat-pros-...

What are the names of the poker pros the AI beat?