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

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

#301

One of the researchers, Tuomas Sundholm, has a real badass CV. Former pilot in the Finnish airforce. Finnish windsurfer champion. Snowboarder. Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Speaks four european languages, including swedish. And now at the age of 51, he has created the best AI powered poker bot. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/cv.pdf

Not to belittle the man's other achievements but speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe, except when you're from the UK.

> speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe

Northern Europe, maybe. French people for instance tend to suck at foreign languages. We rarely go beyond 3 languages (French, English, then German or Spanish. The last two are often forgotten after school.)

I suspect Spain and Italy are similar.

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

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to belittle the man's other achievements but speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe, except when you're from the UK.

Getting in touch with two foreign languages in school is not uncommon, but speaking up to four (including your mother tongue) with any sort of sophistication definitely is not normal, at least in western Europe.

Not uncommon in Scandinavia, if you know one of the languages you can learn the other easily. Some people from Finland have swedish and finnish as their mother tounge, the german most likely came from upper secondary school, together with english.

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

#303

One of the researchers, Tuomas Sundholm, has a real badass CV. Former pilot in the Finnish airforce. Finnish windsurfer champion. Snowboarder. Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Speaks four european languages, including swedish. And now at the age of 51, he has created the best AI powered poker bot. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/cv.pdf

> Speaks four european languages, including swedish. Judging by his name, I'd assume Swedish is his first language, so that particular aspect isn't that surprising to me

Just from the fact that he exists in Finland and is older than 20 it's basically a given that he speaks Swedish because they learn it in school.

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

#304
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to belittle the man's other achievements but speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe, except when you're from the UK.

> speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe Clearly we have different experiences (swedish person living in spain currently) but I haven't met that many people who speak four languages and are from a european country (but have yet to been in eastern europe). That finns speak swedish is a special case though, as AFAIK, they learn swedish in school and being finn-swedish is a thing too.

In Iceland it's pretty normal. We know Icelandic (ofc.) and learn English, one Scandinavian language (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Finnish), then at 15 one of German, French, Italian or Spanish. We are on an island in the middle of the Atlantic. I'd expect more linguistic pluralities on the mainland.

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

#306

One of the researchers, Tuomas Sundholm, has a real badass CV. Former pilot in the Finnish airforce. Finnish windsurfer champion. Snowboarder. Professor at Carnegie Mellon. Speaks four european languages, including swedish. And now at the age of 51, he has created the best AI powered poker bot. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/cv.pdf

Not to belittle the man's other achievements but speaking four languages is pretty normal in Europe, except when you're from the UK.

Most norwegians only speak 2 languages. Swedish and danish is very similar to norwegian, more like dialects, so it doesn't count.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it took the community a while to come up with the right algorithms. So much of early AI research was focused on beating humans at chess and later Go. But those techniques don't directly carry over to an imperfect-information game like poker. The challenge of hidden information was kind of neglected by the AI community. This line of research really has its origins in the game theory community actually (which i…

So will this be the end of online poker?

I'm sitting here considering the possibility of making my own bot to play low stakes online poker ($1.50 sit n go). Run it on 6 tables at once and I imagine it would be facing really poor opponents and would have a steady flow of cash.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well in online poker high level players make great use of player tagging, taking notes about players they have played before and what they've done in important hands or their patterns. Software exists to track how opponents behave in any given situation, and if it pops up again you use that. I would think if professional players are utilising this information, a bot could benefit from it. I don't see how they would e…

Player tagging just makes you exploitable. I play one way now, you tag me "Haha, fool bet-folds way too much" and then I change it up to exploit you, "Huh, I keep trying to fold him out with worse and he doesn't bite even though my notes say he will".

The theoretically optimal play just skips that meta and meta-meta play and performs optimally anyway. Because poker involves chance the optimal play will be stochastic and so you can stare at the noise and think you see a pattern, that just means you'll play worse against it, because you're trying to beat a ghost.

For example, suppose in a certain situation optimally I should raise $50 10% of the time. It so happens, by chance, that I do so twice in a row, and you, the note-taker, record that I "always" raise $50 here. Bzzt, 90% of the time your note will be wrong next time.

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You'd also have to take into account that the sites are monitoring things like reaction times to bets and raises, hand range consistency, etc. You might be surprised by the lengths people go to in order to bypass bot-detection just for ordinary games. All of the things you mentioned are pretty standard. Considering there is serious money on the line here, I am positive that plenty of poker bots will be virtually ind…

The same argument of money being on the line applies to the detection. Poker software is already pretty damn impressive with its tracking. The online casinos actually stand to lose more money than the bot creators could make, so the detection has a greater incentive, and is likely to triumph.

They only lose if there are less plays, surely? I assume they take a cut of all winnings, they're not putting up stakes.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bot does bluff, and in fact it learns from self-play that bluffing is (sometimes) the optimal thing to do. At the end of the day, bluffing is simply betting when you have a weak hand. The bot learns from experience that when it bets with a weak hand, the opponent (another copy of itself) sometimes folds and it makes more money than if it hadn't bet. The bot doesn't view it as deceptive or dishonest. It just views…

> when it bets with a weak hand, the opponent (another copy of itself) sometimes folds and it makes more money than if it hadn't bet. This makes no sense. If I am betting for thin value with a weak hand, then I make less money when my opponent folds. Does the bot not know whether it is bluffing or value betting?

“Value betting” and “bluffing” are human heuristics to simplify complicated situations.

The bot doesn’t “know” whether it’s value betting or bluffing—it’s not a relevant question. The relevant question is whether to bet, and what amount, in order to maximize value of the particular hand it has, with reference to the board and opponent actions taken.

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