Quote:
Originally Posted by dpain
Hey guys i am a former student at the University of Nevada and had a gaming professor named Bill Eadington who is an outside consultant for casinos all across the world and one of the brightest people out there when it comes to casino games. In his class last year we had a few students who worked for IGT so i sent him the info on this game and he replied to me that he sent it out to his entire class including the IGT workers and he would let me know what he came up with. Ill post his response when he sends something back although it might be a week since he mentioned they are in the middle of exam preparation.
I received an email back from Professor Eadington who has brought the machine to the attention of his class as well as some students who work for IGT as engineers and mathematicians and this is some of what they have said. He himself hasnt commented on it yet but im sure he will give his insight about it at some point too. I have a few more questions i am going to pose to him and have him pass along to the IGT kids so if you have anything you want to know leave a question. Might be nice to hear what the IGT employees response is if you have a particular question. The email i got from him is copied and pasted below.
FROM AN IGT ENGINEER
I've heard this a lot recently ... and have especially been keeping up with this forum.
The Artificial Intelligence embedded in the game does not learn ... but it is extremely complex. To the best of my knowledge, and if you had a computer by your side... and knew the exact learned behavior in the game... and made absolutely no mistake ... you might break even ... but a human opponent could not keep that up.
We have invited some of the best players to try before we released the game ... maybe some of your students could try to make a living off of the machine?
Sounds like a good discussion ...
FROM A MATHEMATICIAN
I don't see why they rush to say it is automatically beatable. For a game in which one player lacks the psychological element, is there not an actual perfect strategy?
A chess program uses a fixed, non-learning strategy, and it is not easily beatable. And just because you KNOW what your opponent will do, that still doesn't mean you can automatically win.
And while it is not impossible for IGT to screw up, it seems unlikely, and his "I'm winning, that's proof" does not assuage my doubts. At best, this sounds like an even game, which is subsidized by the large schools of fish.
I immediately imagined that the poker set strategy would also be a mixed strategy, apparently adjusted for each player decision within a single hand, but then forgotten. Such that if it came down to the perfect strategy being bluffing:calling:folding 83:22:38, a player, even having seen many many hands, would still be puzzled as to whether The Brain is going to bluff, call or fold, since he seems to have done all of them at different points. In other words, the perfect strategy is not a pure strategy (like "given hand strength rank 12, and player bx of 1check AND 2raise, decision=FOLD"), which might eventually be deducible, but a pseudo-adaptive mixed strategy that will at least keep the player wondering.
So it seems more likely that The Brain follows not a simple linear protocol, but a slightly recursive game theoretic model.
Seeing as it still is an etched-in-silicon computer program, the player could still get some insight into the opponent, but it would take so long for these wise guys to figure it out (without hacking into IGT's warehouse) that indeed all the fish--and wise guys--will more than make it worth IGT's while to have built the machine.