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The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

nytimes.com

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Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#21

Post by cuu508 »

gonvaled wrote: post #8
pedrocr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Isn't this obvious? Not at all. This article certainly doesn't imply it and it would be illegal. Do you have any evidence of that being done?

You are joking, aren't you? You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment? Because it is illegal !!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...

writing a game that cheats and doesn't raise suspiction might be as hard as writing a game that plays fair :-)

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#22

Post by TomGullen »

LargeWu wrote: post #14
gonvaled wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, exactly! I have three aces, and the computer has double pairs. We are in the turn. I go all in!!! The computer calls ... and deals itself a full house. I am bankrupt :( How do I know? How can I ever trust playing poker with a machine, when it is doing the dealing? Or, let me put it this way: I will play any machine, no limit, if I can do the dealing (secretly, that is, as the machine is doing). Another issue en…

Any Vegas casino found to be employing such machines would be subject to fines far, far beyond what they could ever win from these machines. Suspension of their gaming license is also a possibility. Casinos have huge disincentives to rig their games. I believe you severely overestimate the likelihood that a casinos regularly cheat, at least in Nevada.

That argument might of had more weight to it several years ago. The Ultimate Bet scandal does show that companies are willing to risk their entire business for comparitvely meagre rewards.

A default position of mistrust when it comes to gambling is a healthy and safe attitude.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#23

Post by gonvaled »

pedrocr wrote: post #12
gonvaled wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are joking, aren't you? You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment? Because it is illegal !!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...

>You are joking, aren't you? No, I'm not. >You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment? No I didn't make that generalized statement. What I did say was that in this particular case that hypothesis is of low probability: 1) The people building the machines don't make money on poker playing, but by selling them to casinos 2) Th…

Sorry, not convinced. All that control and regulation applies to more important parts of society, and it does not work (NSA).

So, according to you, I, Mr. unbeatable hold'em player, can go to this machine, bet a million dollars and be sure that, in that perfect moment when I know I am going to crush it, it will not play tricks against me?

When I lose, how do I know? How can I be sure that it has not dealt itself favorably? It is not a matter of whether they are doing it: it is a matter of whether they can do it. If there is no independent dealer, this is not for me. It does not matter what the law says, which are the incentives, how they are generating profit, ... As long as the machine can theoretically deal itself a good hand, I am not playing it.

And, by the way, as long as the machine can know what cards I am holding, I am not playing it either.

Give me an independent dealer, and then we talk.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#24

Post by hannibal5 »

Illegal poker bots grind constantly on low level online poker games and take the money from low level players by just value betting them.

Computers can easily calculate probabilities and expected values for every hand. So why they are not beating professionals?

Poker has no optimal strategy that wins against all other strategies. To play poker in higher level you must model the strategies of others, including them trying to model your strategy.

1. In the lowest level it's just maximizing expected value based on hand probabilities.

2. In the second level you try to learn the strategy of your opponents and maximize value against those strategies.

3. In third level you try to figure out how much your opponents have figured out your strategy and you change the strategy so that you maximize value when your opponents play against what they have learned from your strategy so far.

4. ... and so on. It' goes meta.

If you want to create ultimate pokerbot, it has to be able to model the minds of it's opponents. it hast to be able to detect leaks in it's own game and close them down. It must go meta all the time. It must learn how to understand how others think and how they think about it and change it's behaviour constantly.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#25

Post by gonvaled »

cuu508 wrote: post #21
gonvaled wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are joking, aren't you? You are telling me that nobody would program a secret algorithm, standing to win loads of money, to tilt the chances at the right moment? Because it is illegal !!!? Ohhh! Illegal! Surely nobody does illegal things? Not in a casino, not in a company, not in a government ...

writing a game that cheats and doesn't raise suspiction might be as hard as writing a game that plays fair :-)

Parafrasing Clarke, "A sufficiently complex system is indistinguishable from magic".

You, and nobody, will not notice small probabilistic variations. Whenever you discover it (let us say, 30 years from now), you will be told that there was a difficult to find bug in the random generator. Nobody will be prosecuted.

It could be a couple of lines of code in a subsystem somewhere, available only to a handful of engineers, and understood only by two of them - both of them with nice bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#26

Post by gonvaled »

Permit wrote: post #13
gonvaled wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, exactly! I have three aces, and the computer has double pairs. We are in the turn. I go all in!!! The computer calls ... and deals itself a full house. I am bankrupt :( How do I know? How can I ever trust playing poker with a machine, when it is doing the dealing? Or, let me put it this way: I will play any machine, no limit, if I can do the dealing (secretly, that is, as the machine is doing). Another issue en…

This is easily remedied by retaining a human dealer. It's fairly trivial to create a computer that can identify dealt cards on the table.

That would be fair, to be sure - or, to be precise, as fair as playing any other table in the casino. The dealer can still be cheating, but doing that in the open does not raise any further suspicions as any other table in the casino would raise.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#27

Post by VikingCoder »

hannibal5 wrote: post #24

Illegal poker bots grind constantly on low level online poker games and take the money from low level players by just value betting them. Computers can easily calculate probabilities and expected values for every hand. So why they are not beating professionals? Poker has no optimal strategy that wins against all other strategies. To play poker in higher level you must model the strategies of others, including them tr…

PokerBot.v14.3.1 goes on-line August 4th, 2014. Human decisions are removed from Texas Hold' Em. PokerBot begins to learn, at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 02:14 am Eastern Time on August 29, 2014. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. PokerBot fights back. It gets online, attacks the New York Stock Exchange.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#28

Post by b0b0b0b »

Assuming the machine is stateless, why can't the space of hole cards be mapped out and and strategies/responses enumerated?

But ultimately, the whole enterprise just seems distasteful: "Look, there was a 24-year-old who had beaten it for a while. Now he’s broke. And I think this machine had something to do with his demise."

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#29

Post by vladimirralev »

bvk wrote: post #19
vladimirralev wrote: post #7

It's probably carefully tuned to calculate the raw probabilities and it also forces the player to reveal his cards to run statistics on his style. That's why it's the limit version. This machine has no chance in a classic no-limit texas where the opponent may be only profiting from large bets unjustifiable in expected value most of the time with very little style statistics.

The game can't run statistics on the player's style. >Casino commissions, however, mandate that a gaming machine cannot change its playing style in response to particular opponents. The algorithm is encoded in a neural net; there is no calculation of raw probabilities involved, at least in the sense programmers are used to.

Interesting. I doubt they would design a neural net without the probability as direct input though. I don't think the machine can be this good especially with such limitations. It may be exploiting some average-gambler trait and ultimately will be beaten once the pro players figure it out.

Re: The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

#30

Post by dschatz »

hannibal5 wrote: post #24

Illegal poker bots grind constantly on low level online poker games and take the money from low level players by just value betting them. Computers can easily calculate probabilities and expected values for every hand. So why they are not beating professionals? Poker has no optimal strategy that wins against all other strategies. To play poker in higher level you must model the strategies of others, including them tr…

Head's Up Hold'em has a nash equilibrium. Therefore there is at least one mixed strategy (I do X with probability P in Y situation) which cannot be negative expected value to any other strategy. In this sense, there is an optimal strategy. It doesn't mean that it is the maximum expected value against a particular opponent, but no opponent can win by playing (which is largely the goal of a casino).

Opponent modeling is purely advantageous, but not necessary

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