nah, because approximating a GTO solution in HU play took a supercomputer, and 6max is way more complex

poker is very far from being solved and a true GTO solution is one that probably cant even be replicated by humans due to mixing of bet sizings and frequencies

nah that pretty much is what he's saying (that otb wouldn't be able to efficiently implement exploitative adjustments to punish fish and bad regs at 50nl, that some random 50z jokester would be better at it, lol), and it's incredibly stupid.

Don't you see the iron in you defending your trade, but calling the AI researchers "these awful people [who] are gonna do these awful things"? I agree with you. People competing with people at poker is not immoral. But so is researchers pursuing their trade in their own interest. You can't have it both ways you see. Either both are wrong or neither is.

Charly Sheen put it best; they are "winning". All you are doing is crying about it.

It's not Social Darwinism, it's progress.

Strategy games aren't going anywhere. Online poker for money is. Just take a look at chess. It's doing fine even though computers have been unbeatable at chess for 20 years.

Lol, you are so deluded and self centered. Their goal is to be respected in the world of AI research which gives them prestige and money. They probably also find the work fun.

And yet, backgammon still lives a reasonably healthy life as a strategy game. Plenty of tournaments are being played, you can find tons of VODs of them on youtube and people even still play for money, just not online.

Listen, I'm sorry that you bet on the wrong horse and decided to dedicate your life to the craft of poker. I was in your boat. I was doing ok for myself until black friday. I cried and cursed about how unfair it was, how evil and stupid these lawmakers were, etc. But the reality was inescapable. So I did what I had to do, moved on and found a new job. And BF was a much more unjust or immoral event than scientific progress can ever be.

I mean, the imperfect information nature of poker means that it'll take more time to be solved than a perfect information game, but with the exponential growth of technology it seems safe to assume that the time will eventually come for poker as well.

The work is being done as we speak. It's not called PIOSolver for nothing!

But srsly, I certainly agree with you earlier when you said the segregation of the world's player base is an even bigger problem. My main issue for all of this is that is it COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY for the Alberta people or whoever else to use a game that people actually play for a living to test/improve their software or understand GTO better. They could do the same thing with a game they invent, the science would be the same, and no innocent humans would be adversely affected, but the Alberta people need that sweet sweet grant money so here we are.

I assume you mean "irony", but no, I don't. Pursing my interest doesn't come at the expense of an entire industry and a large group of individuals. Nothing I do will hurt the field of AI. AI scientists are unnecessarily hurting poker and strategy games as a whole.

Playing strategy games for money on the internet IS "going anywhere", which is my whole f point.

Chess hasn't been solved, and significant chess competitions happen live, so I don't understand the comparison. Checkers, however, was solved in 2007, and I would bet anything that the popularity of that game, on the competitive level, has dropped since then. Unfortunately I can't find anything relevant to this on Google.


That is their EXPLICIT goal, whereas I was talking about an implicit goal. I dunno what else to say bro, other than look those words up if you don't understand.


Yes, live. I haven't said word one about live play in this discussion.

More of them ol' bootstraps! Forget about complaining about unjust stuff or trying to make the world a better place, just accept that EVERYTHING IS AS IT IS AND SHALL ALWAYS BE and learn to deal with it. Cool stuff.

Oh, and once again, one can make the exact same scientific progress within AI without directly harming a game which people currently play for a living.

STRATEGY GAMES HAVE A PLACE IN THIS WORLD SO LONG AS I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS TO LEARN AND PROGRESS IN THEM

lol this is ridiculous, why was this "discussion" even moved to a new thread instead of nuked into orbit

I didn't know that any people from Iceland were fans of Reagannomics until today.

this isn't remotely what I have ever said or implied, in my life

who's engaging in histrionics now?

^^^ while you equate "progress" with "destruction"


idk what reagan has to do with you lashing out and whining like an entitled baby itt

and i would piss on reagan's grave, for the record

this is really ****ing dumb tho and i've got better things to do. bye

Right. And how does that relate to "... SO LONG AS I AM THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS TO LEARN AND PROGRESS IN THEM"? It doesn't. I'm very very happy for any random individual in the world to learn more about poker.


I know. I lurk the politics forum (on which you're a bad poster that often gets irrationally angry) all the time. I was speaking to Wolfram. A hint of this is when I mentioned Iceland. Are you from Iceland too?

lol you are indeed very cool, thanks for letting us know that you're above this ... only after talking about it a bunch. Bye.

You have to be joking? Where is the money you win coming from? The tooth fairy? People's lives get destroyed by problem gambling.

That's because you are being willfully obtuse. In both cases humans can use computers to beat other humans that are better than they are. That's what kills the online action.

I understood you fine. They don't care about destroying poker, explicitly nor implicitly.

More meaningless platitudes.

There is nothing unjust about scientific research. And the idea that protecting online poker players edge makes the world somehow a better place is just laughable.

The world doesn't revolve around you.

I am reminded of a story that may or may not be directly relevant to this thread.

When I was in college one of the developers of the first spreadsheet (visicalc) gave a talk to our computer science class.

Near the end of the development phase of his spreadsheet, he went around to local businesses trying to drum up business. One large business he visited suggested he give a talk to the company's accounting department. There were many people in the accounting department each of whom spent all day working on ledgers by hand recording the company's revenues, expenses, etc., generating the company's periodic reports by hand, etc.

During his presentation to the accountants, the developer described how a spreadsheet would work and how it might be utilized in an accounting environment.

He said that he immediately knew that spreadsheets were going to be very successful when half the accountants were giddy with how much easier a spreadsheet would make their lives compared to manual ledgers and the other half of the accountants were crestfallen since they knew they'd be out of a job.

lol what

Like sure, there's nothing fundamentally immoral about botting in itself, but it's kinda ****ed to insert bots into a game where it is both implied that you are playing against humans who are theoretically exploitable, AND explicitly breaking the rules and guidelines set by the companies hosting the games in the first place.

But disregarding that, playing against bots just isn't fun. Poker is fun because you're playing against real people, you can improve your own play, and poke holes in others'. If you want to pit machine learning algorithms against each other to build the most flawless GTO poker machine, sure, but most people don't want to play against that at all, and they DEFINITELY don't want to play against that in their presumably human vs human games with cash on the line. If bots become above a certain % of the playerbase, they will kill online poker, just like they kill every other online game when they reach a certain critical mass.

Online poker for money is only going to die if you grant that botting is both inevitable and unpreventable, which I find to be a pretty dubious claim. Casinos can implement more comprehensive identity verification systems, which will shut out certain areas of the world, but it's certainly not a completely impossible problem to solve.

The money comes from winning in a strategy game against other humans with free will.

Businesses exploit people's weaknesses to make money, often bankrupting them in the process, on a massive, world-wide scale, and yet they're not held to the same moral standard as degen poker player pokerONETWO?

What do you think "marketing" is?

Do you think that casinos are inherently evil?

In other words, you're basically blaming me for being capitalistic. I mean, I will agree with you that capitalism is an unjust and inhumane system of economics if that's what you want to argue!


Um, I know. And bot developers/solvers are bringing poker closer to that point than it otherwise would be, which, again, is my entire problem.

I would give my left arm to be able to gamble on blitz chess online if somehow all engine assistance could be eliminated.

So since you're arguing my own point here, and the rest of what you wrote is just kinda dumb, I'll leave it here.

When I wrote "bot makers" I meant to say AI makers or AI researchers. Actually inserting or using bots in the games that prohibit that is def immoral. But we're not talking about those people, we're talking about the developers of Libratus etc.

btw if you gamble on live chess, like I used to, you risk getting hustled in many ways that would be impossible online

I let a guy talk me into only giving me 2k of the 3.5k he owed me from a blitz session we played all night at a Steak n Shake. I was 17 and he had been in prison for a decade so I don't feel like too much of a pussy.

I'm sure this kinda **** happens all the time in home poker games, people playing on loans etc.

I'm not even reading to make sure, but from context I'd say Wolfram is not saying people who use bots online aren't immoral. Just that research teams that build the bots for academic purposes (like the CM team) are doing nothing wrong -- actually they are doing something that could be +EV for humanity.

Edit: yup

elo,
since you seem confused about what we're arguing, lemme recap:
You: AI researchers evil, poker players good
Me: Neither group is evil

I agree that's what he's saying.

I also think that the Venn Diagram of people interested in AI/GTO and the people who might use bots to cheat in online poker is basically one circle.

And I directly argued that they could make the same +ev contribution to humanity WITHOUT hurting poker and other games.

You said that I (a poker player) exploit people's gambling addiction to make money and heavily implied that that is immoral. "People's lives get destroyed by problem gambling" is an exact quote.

If you somehow think that destroying people's lives is not immoral or amoral then I'll retract my argument and just start thinking you're a really weird guy.

You can think that all the people who are interested in ai/gto are people planning on using bots to cheat. But you have no experience or idea what you're talking about, so what you think isn't worth anything.

Do you think the biggest tech companies are throwing money at people who build AI that can beat games like poker and go are doing it because they want to run bots and steal a few million dollars?

And you're being naive. There is no world in which technology advances and people just leave poker alone because some small % of the population enjoys playing it online. Sucks for you and me, but that's how it is.

No, I don't think that. lol

Maybe it's on me, maybe I'm being too verbose or something.

I think these people are unnecessarily and significantly hurting the livelihoods of thousands of people. In all other walks of life it's a big deal when a bunch of people lose their jobs, and AI teams and the like are indirectly doing exactly that to game players. Poker playing contributes no less to society than many other things that people do for money, so I don't see why you can shrug that off so glibly.

I agree that "that's how it is", but I don't see why that's how it always has to be.

I was kinda happy when i saw Libratus crush them
All we need is to have good bot detection, human vs human will always have a massive skill cap even when poker is completely solved

It's just impossible for limited rational human brain to ever come close to the crazy mixes and sizes Libratus was using, in deep NLHE 6max + optimal poker is something no human can ever achieve or even come very close to

ah i didn't see the context

arguing that ai researchers are immoral cuz they put professional gamblers at risk of losing their jobs is about as coherent as arguing that letting people pump their own gas is immoral because it destroys jobs.

which is to say its totally ridiculous, at a fundamental level, professional poker players produce close to 0 utility for society. I guess high roller tourneys which are televized have some cultural/entertainment value but a 1/3 grinder isn't doing **** for anyone besides filling up a seat at a table.

PIO is great, gotta make sure we dont get exploited by that guy 1 million times better than LLinus. Humans can get so close to long term practical PIO accuracy too. Sure there's emotion, tilt and all that but I think the human brain can compute on a regular basis within 30s ea time what the %'s were and use rng to choose. Damn just realized it will be highest ev strat almost 0% of the time vs 99.99% of poker players due to playing vs people 1 million times dumber than me(PIO near perfected human on long term consistent basis) and I can just exploit them instead.