311–320 of 407 posts
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
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The bot handles each hand independently. How the players play in one hand does not affect how the bot plays in future hands at all. That said, it did train by playing against itself (before the experiment against the humans began).
Interesting. Does this mean that it cannot adjust to human players "switching gears"? Isn't this a huge leak?
t. former poker pro
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> 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.
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> 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.
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Top pros will endorse whatever they're paid to endorse.
This is falsifiable by any number of cases, but Isaac Haxton spurning PokerStars is probably one of the best examples so others see your comment is not universally applicable. https://upswingpoker.com/isaac-haxton-pokerstars-partypoker/
I'm not sure the really provides strong opposition to the GP's claim.
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.
I rarely met someone who could speak four languages fluently.
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Smaller stack sizes reduce possibilities and thus reduce complexity. Pay jumps result in chips having different utility to each player which forces some situational playstyles to be more optimal. I would guess that this also reduces the complexity of the game. Since tournaments don't often spend much time with stacks much deeper than 100bb, I would guess that tournaments would be more easily solved. Though tournament…
You're right that a single short stack hand in a vacuum has fewer game tree branches, and that factoring in chip utility is also fairly straightforward. But I strongly disagree that it reduces the overall complexity of the game. The model in the article played every single hand with 100bb; to be an effective tournament player it would have to be able to fluidly adjust strategies between big, medium and short stack pl…
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It does bluff, but that’s not my point. My issue is that it bluffs without consideration of its opponent. High level strategic play of most games is about adapting to your opponents play. This bot does not do that. It is secretly a giant lookup table of game state to response. In the case of poker, it appears that adaptability is not as good as pure mathematical optimization. Humans can adapt their strategy, but it’s…
> 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…
That said, for this bot, I wouldn't say it's playing completely independent of the other players's interior state. Pluribus must infer its opponents strategy profile and according to the paper, maintains a distribution over possible hole cards and updates its belief according to observed actions. This is part of playing in a minimally exploitable way in such a large space for an imperfect information game.
I'm one of the authors of the bot, AMA
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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…
1. Coming up with an unexploitable strategy, then scaling it up by playing as many hands as you can, earning the slim expected value each time.
2. Picking a good table / card room / 'scene', and then trying to extract as much value from it as possible.
You most often see 1 online, and 2 live, for obvious reasons.
A skilled human would be a lot more successful, I believe, than a bot in case 2. For 2, important skills are:
1. Be entertaining. You have to play in a way that is entertaining to those playing with you, such that they want to continue playing with you (and losing money to you). Good opponents (i.e. that are bad at poker but want to play high stakes) are hard to find, it is vital that you retain them.
2. Cultivate a table image, then exploit it. Especially important for tournament play, where you have the concept of "key hands" that you really need to win to potentially win the tournament. With the right table image, you may be able to win hands you otherwise wouldn't have won.
3. Exploit the specifics of the players you are playing against. Yes, that also makes you exploitable, but the idea is to stay one step ahead of your opponents.