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

AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 234 posts

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#211

Post by xapata »

brilliantcode wrote: post #205
xapata wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! That's an amusing interpretation of how supply and demand interact to find an equilibrium price/quantity point. A typical Econ 101 textbook says: higher demand --> higher price higher price --> higher supply higher supply --> lower price lower price --> higher demand In Econ 101 we pretend that cycle eventually reaches an equilibrium. In grad school we analyze the dynamics. But even if we believed your demand cau…

Yes and if you've actually paid attention you will see that a high salary signals other workers to flood the market with a lower salary thus starting the race to the bottom :) Programmers have largely driven themselves to zero, just take a look at the workers on freelance websites and how much difficulty a native English speaking freelancer has against an army of commoditized labor. There are still six digit earning…

There's some premium for face-to-face, but it turns out that even with remote work, price is still a good indication of quality.

I'm a freelancer and fully booked, so maybe those low cost competitors aren't so competitive after all.

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#212

Post by deepnotderp »

brilliantcode wrote: post #208
deepnotderp wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karpathy was offered in excess of a million out of school, I'm going to assume that you don't know what you're talking about. Silly google, they must've skipped Econ 101 since they hire tons of engineers and are doing TERRIBLY!

And how many Karpathy is there working for non-Google? Mariah Carrey made $140 million dollar record deal with Sony Music, there's boat load of money to make in the music scene!

So your SOLE contribution is capital, right?

Why would I go to you and not a VC firm? I sure as hell don't want to work for someone like you....

(oh and there are plenty of others like Karpathy, like Facebook, Baidu, Microsoft, Uber, Amazon, a metric fuckton of startups, etc. who are being paid ridiculous amounts of money to build nets)

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#213

Post by xapata »

BigJono wrote: post #194
_dps wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add something, and to clarify (though I don't think you've made any mistake here, but many people misunderstand this subject): The 33%-each Nash Equilibrium is the mixed strategy Nash Equilibrium of the micro game (i.e. a single round of RPS, averaged over all possible randomizations). This is in no way the Nash strategy of the tournament game, which is "win the tournament given a pool of unknown participants and…

> You have to add additional assumptions (e.g. that everyone else is going to play the uniform random strategy) in order for uniform random to be the Nash strategy for the tournament game. Isn't that literally what a Nash Equilibrium is though? It's my understanding that if there is players playing exploitably in the game then it cannot (by definition) be a Nash Equilibrium, so the Nash strategy may no longer be the…

Correct. Nash equilibrium exists only if everyone takes the equilibrium-seeking strategy.

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#214

Post by marklgr »

mod wrote: post #209
rograndom wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Big Game" which was run by Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, etc had nothing to do with HUNL. It's mostly run hoping that some inexperienced player would drop in. It also almost always ran as a rotation of games to both bring in players who though they had an edge in "their" game and then exploit them in the other games. The Big Game and online HUNL are both technically "poker" but they are truly completely different g…

I'm fully aware--I was a poker pro for a while in a niche (HUSNGs). The post I responded to slighted Negreanu, saying he wasn't a "top pro." He certainly is. Not a HU cash pro, of course, but a top pro? Absolutely. A match for the "best pro players?" Certainly. The "best pro players" in a given niche wouldn't have sat in the big game, and he wouldn't have sat in their specialty. Overall he's the better poker player.

Parent's comment about the big game is accurate; they were all friends waiting for some whale to show up, so playing there doesn't mean you're one of the best players in the world, skill-wise.

Up to 2010, Negreanu had some up and down and as poker theory developed, his game showed a number of pretty big flaws--which he himself admitted. Sure, he was a competent player, so calling him just a 'celebrity' might be misleading, but there were many players in the top online scene who did a lot more of volume and analysis that Negreanu, who pushed more edge and who leaked much less.

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#215

Post by 6nf »

xapata wrote: post #151

I suspect Libratus' overbet frequency is overfit to this particular reduced-variance game format. In a normal game, the opponent doesn't take chips off the table after winning a hand and might stand up at any moment. It's hard to know how much that affected the strategy, but in the Reddit thread, the human players said the overbet frequency was what they were most surprised by.

Maybe overbetting is better EV and humans just don't know it yet. It will be interesting to see if this changes the game at the higher stakes Heads Up tables

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#216

Post by 6nf »

nippples wrote: post #173

Can someone clarify why exactly is this being presented as more impressive than beating Chess masters or even Go masters? People talk a lot about number of states in poker, but the hand and visible cards can be easily (to a statitician) reduced to a scalar "probability of having the best hand". At least in terms of crunching the possibility tree this should be a far less computationally intensive challenge.

The game of poker differs from Go and Chess in that poker players deal with incomplete information and therefore a successful strategy has to include randomness. If you are dealt AA under the gun, you can't just raise 100% of the time, you have to play a mixture of different moves, perhaps raise big 80% of the time, raise small 10% of the time and limp in 10% of the time (for example). With Go or Chess you can just play the best move in each particular situation and you will not lose.

It's just a different kind of game

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#218

Post by 6nf »

mod wrote: post #183
halflings wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > A poker-playing AI has beaten four human players in a marathon match lasting 20 days. 20 days seems like plenty of time. No ?

No, the number of hands is relevant here, not the number of days played.

They won 14.7 big blinds per 100 hands, playing 120k hands. That's a pretty good win rate and a decent sample size but I don't know how to calculate the p value

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#219

Post by 6nf »

afastow wrote: post #111

Sounds like the end of online poker is very near. This version required a supercomputer and took a long time to decide its actions but those type of things tend to be quickly improved given enough motivation. Even if poker sites could somehow perfectly detect automated players(which they can't of course), highly skilled poker is profitable enough that some people would be willing to manually execute the actions thems…

Online sites have been overrun by bots and cyborgs for years at all but the highest stakes. Most players are already being fleeced by computers online.

Re: AI Beats Four Top Poker Players

#220

Post by adamlett »

mod wrote: post #210
adamlett wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, not many of the celebrity players have had much success playing online. Ivey did have some good years but even he has been struggling for the past few years. Almost all pros who have had success both online and live agree that live games a ridiculously soft compared to online games. The reason more online pros don't play live is because you have to live in Las Vegas or Macau to play a the highest stakes,…

I don't dispute any of that, I simply dispute whether or not Negreanu is a "top pro," or whether he would be a match for "the top pros." He is a top pro. Not in HU cash. He couldn't hang with these guys at HU cash, at least not with his current skill in the discipline. But hey, poker is not that narrow of a term. It includes all kinds of disciplines, live and online, horse and stud and hold 'em, the list goes on. Tho…

There is no question that Daniel Negreanu is a very good tournament player, possibly one of the best. I don't think there is any evidence that he is anywhere near the top when it comes to cash games of any popular variety.

And while bankroll management is certainly an important and required skill to endure as a professional poker player at any level, it is by no means what differentiates high-stakes pros from pros at the lower levels. There are lots of small stakes and mid stakes players who practice sensible bankroll management, but who will never acquire the skill necessary to make it at the highest levels. If you want to get a sense of how much skill goes into playing poker at the highest level, you should watch some of Phil Galfond's strategy videos on YouTube (see for instance [1]). Poker strategy has come a long way since Super System[2] and The Theory of Poker[3]. Even players who were considered very good just five years ago, can no longer compete at the highest levels.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khdoSFCQ9iA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super/System [3] http://www.twoplustwo.com/books/poker/theory-of-poker/

Post reply on HN