If you read about hardware RNGs, which are the ones used by FTP and Stars for instance, they use quantum noise of some kind (sorry my knowledge of QM is insufficient to explain this -- I just believe it is possible based on what I do know) to generate their randomness, and are not pseudo-random. Therefore there are not algorithms involved. To be fair, pRNGs would likely be sufficient, but hardware RNGs are as truly random as possible. Far more so than say a shuffling machine in a casino which are usually based on pRNGs, or a human shuffler. As a side note, take an ordered deck, and shuffle it in a few different ways and compare the results by spreading the deck out. Unless you do a wash, you'll see that it isn't very random.

-S

LOL at quoting FoxNews

If the world is full of people who believe what they hear on FoxNews, it shouldn't be hard to make computers that are smarter. lol.

Topics like these demonstrate the mass ignorance of the fact that poker is a solvable game just like tic tac toe or checkers or chess (out of these three, only chess has not been solved). It is a fact that there exists a strategy which is completely unbeatable. No matter what strategy you use against it, you will literally never be >0bb/100 against it overall. The best you can do is be 0bb/100 (by using the same strategy). It doesn't matter if the bot has no idea about your strategy if it has solved the game.

You are all talking about this bot math and complex randomness. I'm thinking that one time in the future there will be bots that read your hand by smelling you.

You can probably program a computer to beat the best players in the world, but I doubt you can program one that can exploit bad players as well as the best human players can.

Lol, may be true, but too esoteric at this point in time. I see where you're going with this though.

anyone who votes no lacks understanding of either poker or computing. probably both.

poker is emotion based a lot imo.. dont see how AI could get things like gameflow and tilt (but then again i dont understand anything of neither poker or computing)

That's the whole point of making a bot which can adapt.

I tend to agree with Six Finger Nate. I have no doubt that computers will be able to solve poker in a GTO sense, maybe within the next 10 years, but the GTO bot may still not be the best player at the table. Even though Ivey can't beat it when they get in a headsup pot together, his exploitative winnings in pots where the bot has folded might add up to more than the bot's winnings. That said, I'm pretty sure bots can and will be developed that make exploitative adjustments better than humans (Polaris already did this to some extent) but it's worth bearing in mind that the human mind can do things that computers as yet can't, i.e. solve problems non-algorithmically. That's according to Roger Penrose (The Emperor's New Mind) anyway, it may be a debatable point.

I'm going to use this one particular example but what I'm about to say applies to any specific thing you can come up with and ask how a bot can do it.

The way a human spots a perfect "bluff squeeze spot" isn't through some sort of magical power that triggers some magical warning bell in a different plane of existence that peeks through the aether at the exact right moment and whispers in the player's ear "hey you should bluff here, it's a perfect spot to squeeze."

The way a human finds a spot like that is by playing a bunch of hands where similar situations occur and then identifying the pattern or patterns that are common to those situations and then looking for them going forward. A contrived but somewhat realistic simplified example of a pattern that might help identify the opportunity for a squeeze might be something like:

Player A in seat 5 limps, player B in seats 6 raises and we are play C in seat 7.

From our history with these players we know that player A is a loose passive player that likes to limp and see flops but often folds to raises.

Player B is a laggy player that raises >50% of their hands preflop but often folds to re-raises.

We can identify this pattern because we are aware of concepts like "loose passive", "LAG", "limp", etc. and we talk about, think about, and study what various combinations of all of these things mean.

No bot is ever going to do the talking, thinking, and studying and then come to the realization that that spot is a good spot to squeeze.

However, there are two reasons why this doesn't matter.

1. A human can do the talking, thinking, and studying and and then program a rule into a bot to look for this situation. On the surface this doesn't seem like that big of a risk because it seems as if no one would ever be able to program a bot that plays better then themselves then... but there are two very simple and obvious flaws with that line of thinking.

First, even the Ivey's and Durrr's of the world are prone to tilt or mistakes like misreading a hand or misjudging their equity and/or other math errors. Bot programmers may make mistakes as well, but over time they'll find them and fix them until the bots are perfect. So even if you could only make a bot that was as good at poker decision making as you it would play better than you because it would never tilt or make a math error, etc.

Secondly, and more importantly, there's no rule that says only one person has to program a bot or that that one person can't consult with the greatest minds of the game. If I had a year to write a bot and for that year I had unlimited access to any 10 top NLHE players and they were completely open in answering my questions I am sure I could write a bot that would beat them all (and pretty much anyone else). I'm sure the UoA guys could do it even more quickly.

2. There are learning algorithms that make it unnecessary to go the route described in (1). This is just off the top of my head but I could imagine a bot that was essentially built as a series of Restricted Boltzmann Machine's where each RBM maps to one "level" of thinking and the bot can basically derive what level of thinking each player is on by often their shown-down hands don't match up to what it would predict. Each RBM would know how to very closely to perfectly play a player on each level of thinking. Each time a player adjusts the bot would adjust the RBM that's its using to analyze that player. It would take a long time to polish the whole thing off but my guess is you could train something to beat average players with just a few hundred thousand hand histories and top players with a few million.

I'm not a machine learning expert so I may be way off base in the applicability of RBM's specifically and that particular idea may be hogwash but my point in general is that the state of the art on these types of techniques is advancing extremely rapidly and computers will soon be better than humans at a number of tasks that years ago nobody would've guessed, e.g. voice recognition, image recognition, etc.

And this stuff isn't pie-in-the-sky stuff either. At my company we use some very simple machine learning algorithms (Bayesian classifiers, voted perceptron, etc) to do tasks quickly and cheaply that would be either cost- or time- prohibitive if humans had to do it. These tasks are much more simple than playing NLHE but most people are very surprised when we tell them that the output they were looking at was generated by computers and not by humans. And these are basically entry level machine-learning algorithms.

I don't know if the last line is a good analogy or not but the first paragraph is dead on and exactly what I was trying to say with my long-winded reply above.

Explain, please.
Poker isn't a game that can be "solved" because the basis of victory or defeat isn't a matter of how well someone solves the "game", but how well someone combats the strategy their opponent is implementing. (in the same way a Football game can never be "solved").

There will always be an opposing strategy that exploits the oppositions strategy...it's an endless and infinite cycle.

ofc eventually a computer will be better than any human. A much more interesting question is when this will happen. I think a lot of people are greatly overestimating how close we are to being able to program true AI, and not just a program that mimics AI .

A human being can only adapt so much He/she can only think so much "outside the box" of their own minds. A computer has no inherent limits, as it has no identity per se. Also, you can add indefinitely to a computer program. The same cannot be said for a single person (human), at least at this point in history.

Of course, as there are so many variables in poker, including luck, over small to medium sample sizes, who knows what will happen. But as the sample size grows ad infinitum, the bot will gain the edge and the gap will only widen.

It's not as though human minds have some magical ability to adapt to situations and make adjustments to situations. Our brain is a biological machine. Humans beings are actually notoriously slow in adapting and resist change very strongly because of limitations due to self-identity etc. A computer does not have these limitations. It will adapt continuously through infinite iterations without ever hitting the wall by facing an identity crisis lol.

WRONG. Poker can be solved. That is a fact ans the sooner you accept it the better. Just like in tic tac toe or checkers, in poker there exists a strategy that literally cannot be exploited (while at the same time allowing the opponent to make sub optimal plays). Play me at tic tac toe or chinook at checkers. No matter what strategy you use, you CANNOT exploit your opponents' strategies. There is an unexploitable strategy in poker, it just hasn't been found yet. There is random chance and incomplete information in poker but this doesn't change anything.

How could you tell the difference? I don't think I could. For all I know, we ourselves are AI, running in a virtual environment, sitting on someone's desk.

To your question of when will this happen, maybe it already has, and we are AI version 1.0 or something. And we will add to the environment we are alive in by pooling our resources and creating AI version 2.0. And so on lol.

"WRONG"...okay, well... show me how I'm wrong. You can't make base-less ramblings like this.

Show me a chess player, football player/coach, basketball player/coach, checkers player, etc. who has "solved" their particular game. Provide me with links to their strategies, dialogue, and analyzations that undoubtedly conclude that these particular people's strategies can't be exploited.

Also, stop with your "tic tac toe" analogy... it's a game of extremely limited strategies and options and is about the polar opposite of poker. It's a void comparison.

If Player 1 is implementing strategy A
Player 2 can exploit it using strategy B
Player 1 decides to implement strategy C to exploit strategy B Player 2 implements strategy A to exploit C
...it's endless.

So, like I said, show me ANYTHING that indicates how this basic principle can be overcome. I'm asking for you to EXPLAIN how this cycle can be broken, not just saying "WRONG"...because that means crap.

For awhile Iverson was the best, but he's not even in the NBA anymore. Shouldn't this thread be in the Sports forum?

You came late

In the post you quoted I linked to an AI (chinook) that has solved chess. It is literally undefeatable. It is impossible to exploit its strategy.

It's not a void comparison. The fact that you think it's a void comparison is alarming to me. It tells me that you know nothing about basic game theory. The complexity of the rules of a game has nothing to do with if it is possible to solve the game or not though it related to how difficult it is to find the unexploitable strategy (i.e., solve the game). All heads up games are solvable (I'm talking about non physical games).

Fair enough.
However, chess is a game of limited options. Even if there's 5,000,000 move combinations possible over the entirety of a game...that is still a firm figure. There's literally an infinite amount of circumstances and variables in poker. (number of players, stack sizes, infinite changing aggression levels, tilt, mood, and obviously the billions of card combinations).

With that said, comparing tic tac toe, which has VERY limited variables to poker is absurd. If something has infinite variables, and variables that can't even be accurately detected (like mood), it is 100% impossible to "solve". It would be like trying to "solve" a chess board that changes shape/amount of spaces randomly and infinitely while you play on it...which would make it unsolvable.

Can a robot make ivey fold kk ? nope only brad booth

Very interesting analogy.

OK, Karganeth, you're missing the point, as people tend to do in these threads, which is not whether AI can solve poker, but whether it can exploit humans better than other humans can. FWIW like you I'm an optimist wrt AI/singularity stuff, but I'd like your input on the idea that human brains solve some problems non-algorithmically and your opinion on whether machines will be able to do this at some point.