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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

#381

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I'm wondering how long until poker games will require a captcha on every round

Will not help against human/AI hybrids. Use machine vision to decipher state of the game, and covertly suggest moves via audio or perhaps vibrations.

Pokerstars who suspect accounts are bots actually require the player to film 360 degrees around themselves, then play for an hour with a camera focusing on input devices and the screen, they check for differences between current behavior and historic behavior

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

#382

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.

If you want to keep your conversation private it is not enough to choose a rare language in Berlin. There is always somebody who understands what you are saying.

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

#383
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding the big sites have some pretty sophisticated bot detection systems, so in theory a bot that would be successful at beating online poker couldn't be a huge winner, it'd presumably raise too many red flags. However, if it were a near break-even player, with dozens, if not hundreds, of instances running at any given time, it's going to slowly grind out a substantial figure. You'd also have to take…

Poker sites mainly detect bots based on their login times, number of tables, time per action, etc. A successful bot shouldn't get caught for "playing like a bot" because the moment it's actions are that predictable it would presumably no longer be effective. But it will get caught for operating like a bot. So, don't run it 24hrs a day. Sites also randomize things to keep bots at bay, even card imagery. If your perfor…

Not to mention, if you get caught, there could be worse consequences than just having your account locked. The site could (and likely would if the scale was significant) sue you for not only all your winnings, but damage to their business. They would likely win (since you're flagrantly breaking their terms of use contract), and bankrupt you.

Edit: In fact, if we're talking worst case, circumventing their anti-bot restrictions would presumably be illegal under the CFAA. So if you're in the US you could even be charged criminally, although I expect in reality that would be less likely.

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

#384
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper is here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/07/10/scie... It's going for game-theory-optimal play. It doesn't adapt to its opponents' observed weaknesses. But I think it's cool to show that you don't need to adapt to opponent weaknesses to win at poker at the highest levels. You just need to not have any weaknesses yourself.

> you don't need to adapt to opponent weaknesses to win at poker at the highest levels that may be true for limit poker, but in a no-limit tournament the best this bot could do is not lose. as the pressure increases with the blinds and the players are forced to bluff and call bluffs how does this bot avoid folding itself to death from a run of bad cards? I could see this bot doing well at cashing but I don't see how…

The blinds don’t increase it’s a cash game not tournament

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

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American, I am now going to bang my head into a wall.

Nothing to do with being American, since you're afforded the luxury to learn other languages for free through public schooling. If anything, bang your head because you chose not to.

Speaking as an American who speaks a handful of languages, very few Americans achieve any proficiency with foreign languages based on school from public school classes. Indeed I'm willing to take to zero those that don't have an active speaking component (most).

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

#386

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?

Where does your quote say that the bet is a value-bet? I read it as saying that the bot learned to bluff (not value bet) by betting when it has a weak hand (I.e. The bot has a weak hand, so it's getting better hands to fold by betting). The phrase "value bet"was not used.

(This, in addition to what the other comments have said about there being spots where a bet can get better hands to fold with some probability AND get worse hands to call with some probability - see the chapter "The grey area between value betting and bluffing" in Applications of No Limit Hold Em)

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

#387
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't need to adapt to opponent weaknesses to win at poker at the highest levels that may be true for limit poker, but in a no-limit tournament the best this bot could do is not lose. as the pressure increases with the blinds and the players are forced to bluff and call bluffs how does this bot avoid folding itself to death from a run of bad cards? I could see this bot doing well at cashing but I don't see how…

I think this comes down to ambiguity over what "optimal play" means. There's a poker strategy we might call 'deterministically' optimal play, which consists of precisely assessing each hand's expected value with little to no bluffing. This is already common in online cash games with both bots and players running multiple games at once. And you're right - it's excellent at running net-positive and not losing, but unli…

that's a helpful explanation thank you! I was misunderstanding the statement about Pluribus not modeling its opponents between hands as between rounds - it's definitely modeling its opponents and detecting bluffs by understanding when a bluff is likely strategically based on each opponents actions so far in the hand, it's just not taking anything it learned into the next hand.

I could see this being an effective strategy in a WSOP, that ability to perfectly forget the previous hand is probably more valuable than anything the way WSOP champions play. I could see it coming down to whether or not the ability to exploit a reliable tell during a pivotal hand matters more than 10% of the time.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the bot needs to know who is in what position what the bets are, who folded, etc. Try inputting all of that information manually to the laptop next to you and you'll quickly get frustrated. Online poker is a fast game with lots of data points.

TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe, Keras, MXNet, and OpenCV could copy the game if you split the video input for the player and the bot.

Yes, but see my previous comment.

People have tried it and online poker sites know they've tried it, so they'll randomize images and other data. If you take a dive when the randomizations are triggered and outperform otherwise good luck trying to collect your winnings.

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

#389
post #321
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am a classical musician, and in my profession it is quite common. I speak a lowly 3 languages, but many colleagues speak 4+. It is a very international market, and if you leave your home country to study, it is not uncommon to work in yet another country before returning home. Our solo flute speaks a whopping 6 languages well, and I suspect our harp player knows even more.

I should have mentioned: this is in Sweden.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Player tagging is more complicated than a single game, and goes far deeper than playing a few hands one way and then switching it up. You can have player stats based on thousands of hands, you can know things about your opponent even they don't know.

I don't think you play very much, which is fine, but makes this discussion a bit pointless.

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