Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Steely, Headless King of Texas Hold ’Em

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 99 posts

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

#41

Post by adamlett »

gonvaled wrote: post #6
menubar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..or, he greatly underestimated the fact that the computer knows what cards it has dealt to you. Isn't this obvious?

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…

Two points:

1) This is (fixed) limit Hold'em; you can't suddenly go all-in.

2) You ask how you could trust the machine. It would be trivial to keep track of all hands played and show that in the situations like the one you describe, the computer only makes a full house the expected ~9% of the times.

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

#42

Post by Someone »

ianstallings wrote: post #10

The article says the machine can't be beaten. And then points out that a pro has consistently won against it. This article is filled with bold claims by people that want to sell the idea IMHO. I'm not buying it because even limit texas Hold'Em has never been solved mathematically by super computers, let alone a single machine. Limit Hold'Em is close to being solved but if you check out the last match of pros against…

Is it actually possible to mathematically solve those games? Suppose player Alice bets $100; how does player Bob judge that bet? As a strong hand or as a bluff? Any software program will have to model what's inside the head of its opponent, and we know way too little of that to do that.

Moreover, if we could, the opponent may choose a different strategy. It may be like a game with nontransitive dice: if you figure out which dice I use, you can beat me, but if I figure out that you figured that out, I can pick different dice and beat you (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice)

I think it is possible to write software that statistically beats any opponent, but proving that it does is way harder.

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

#43

Post by ubernostrum »

adam-a wrote: post #35

Is there any guarantee that the machine isn't simply reading your hand and then occasionally letting you win to keep the payout at ~80%?

An opponent who knows what's in your hand and bets based on that knowledge is not terribly hard to detect. The way to make it hard to detect is to have it not make bets based on knowledge of your hand.

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

#44

Post by snake_plissken »

I don't understand how the machine can change the style of its play if: "Casino commissions, however, mandate that a gaming machine cannot change its playing style in response to particular opponents."

Yet the article states that the machine has multiple personalities (passive, aggressive, etc) and will sometimes throw hands.

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

#45

Post by pessimizer »

snake_plissken wrote: post #44

I don't understand how the machine can change the style of its play if: "Casino commissions, however, mandate that a gaming machine cannot change its playing style in response to particular opponents." Yet the article states that the machine has multiple personalities (passive, aggressive, etc) and will sometimes throw hands.

Changing strategies randomly or in response to opponent play is probably not what's being referred to here. What would be banned would be the machine noticing that John Doe hasn't won in a while and his play has slowed down, so lets throw a few hands to keep him interested.

In other words, machines are allowed to shark $player, but not allowed to target John Doe specifically.

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

#46

Post by hannibal5 »

dschatz wrote: post #30
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 i…

Nash Equilibrium assumes that each player knows equilibrium strategies of the other players. It does not apply to No Limit Hold Em.

You can solve equilibrium for simplified poker games like just Heads Up with only shove or call an all-in options though.

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

#47

Post by ianstallings »

Someone wrote: post #42
ianstallings wrote: post #10

The article says the machine can't be beaten. And then points out that a pro has consistently won against it. This article is filled with bold claims by people that want to sell the idea IMHO. I'm not buying it because even limit texas Hold'Em has never been solved mathematically by super computers, let alone a single machine. Limit Hold'Em is close to being solved but if you check out the last match of pros against…

Is it actually possible to mathematically solve those games? Suppose player Alice bets $100; how does player Bob judge that bet? As a strong hand or as a bluff? Any software program will have to model what's inside the head of its opponent, and we know way too little of that to do that. Moreover, if we could, the opponent may choose a different strategy. It may be like a game with nontransitive dice: if you figure ou…

Yeah I think that's the main hurdle actually, the information-sparsity problem. We never really know what the opponent holds, unlike chess where nothing can be hidden. Also there is the case of non-optimal play from an opponent and modeling that would be incredibly challenging.

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

#48

Post by tom_b »

Quite fun to see neural networks in the news. A million years ago I took a class on neural networks, using backpropagation to train networks to do image classification.

I will never forget the feeling of "you've got to be kidding me" when the code I had written was able to successfully classify a huge percentage of the validation image set. I really should head back in that direction and get with the machine learning.

Re: poker software. Before the feds crushed online poker, I had already given up on low-limit limit hold-em. It had clearly become a bot and augmented-player race. I would assume given game theory and Bill Chen's book that some enterprising hackers would encode pretty decent no-limit bots as well. If any hackers know anything about successful no-limit bots, I'd enjoy reading about it.

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

#49

Post by ianstallings »

heifetz wrote: post #15
scotch_drinker wrote: post #2

In his book Super System, Doyle Brunson wrote that a computer would never be able to play elite poker because you played the man, not the cards or the game. He greatly underestimated the power of modern computing it appears. Personally, I'd rather see resources go into a robot that can cook for me but development follows the money I suppose.

the same type of thinking that chess grandmasters had before computers and algorithms eventually caught up? I think it's just a matter of time, as long as the computer is not cheating, that computers and algorithms can beat most poker players.

Chess, unlike poker, is solvable because all situations past and present can be modeled. To do that in poker is incredibly more computing intense and the only computer I know of that has came close is the University of Alberta's Polaris: http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/

Notice they tackle limit texas hold'em to keep the mathematics within reach. That's the time of crunching we're taking about. No-limit is impossible at this time. Not only will they need incredible computing power, but they also need the math to run it all, which remains unsolved. Could they use Sklansky's theory of Poker along with other optimal playing mathematics to win? Sure. But creating an unbeatable computer player? That is the incredible challenge.

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

#50

Post by ianstallings »

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…

I agree. In simple terms what you said: you would have to model a real human. Something that has never been accomplished.
Post reply on HN