Quote:
Originally Posted by Tackleberry
"Thanks to people’s feedback and internal analysis, we found several leaks in PokerSnowie's strategy. We have fixed some of them by reviewing and changing our learning algorithm."
Can you explain that a bit more (w/o revealing any "secrets")? For obvious reasons it is / was not possible to fix the "strategy", now you said you fixed the "learning algorithm". How can that fix improve Snowies strategy in short time - when it´s current strategy is the result of billions and billions of played hands so far?
Hi Tackleberry,
you are right to wonder. In fact the answer is not easy, without entering into to many technical details.
Occasionally, in order to fix some issues in a very short term, we do like we wrote in the answer to David Sklansky: "
for bet sizes that Snowie has never seen in training (like a 1% pot bet or a 100 times pot bet), algorithms have been implemented to handle these situations as good as possible."
Like you said, a full solution of an issue like this would need a new training to run and this would require some time. I admit that the short term solution in having some algorithms to handle these situations is suboptimal and it's more a patch than a real solution. When possible, we always try to avoid patches.
This point might seem conflicting with our statement that we don’t introduce expert knowledge in the AI, and in fact it partially is – apologies for that. But it should be clear that these patches are used only in very special and very uncommon situations, where we think it’s not worth to spend so much time, because they would not bring value to our customers. The 1% pot bet issue for example, is something which makes the AI technically exploitable, but on the other hand no one would play this strategy online and therefore fixing it was more to avoid this exploitation than to make it more useful for our customers. For this purpose, in the short term, we felt that a patch was enough.
In fact, because our CPU time is obviously limited, we need to choose on which aspects of PokerSnowie to focus. If we feel that how to play vs. a 1% pot bet is not crucial for the PokerSnowie goal, then we prefer to use our CPU for other improvements, like for example introducing other bet sizes. Obviously when you start a new training you can’t be sure if and when you will get the results.
Also, when I write “We fixed some of them”, I don’t always mean that the AI is ready. I mean that we fixed what we believe was causing the problem, but we still need to wait for the training to progress. Finally, in certain situation it’s not needed to start the training from scratch.
I hope this answer, at least at high level
Best Regards,
Roberto Gobbo
CEO - Snowie Games Ltd.