I don't know if it is necessary to clarify this but, these are bots running in a closed testing environment, not on an internet poker site.

Still a big deal, but not a crisis of biblical proportions.

no, I believe he was saying that their program played against another botter who has a program which is capable of giving players advice in real time and said program has been successful at stakes as high as 1knl. am I mistaken by this?

Maybe that was it. But the statement did include the word "apparently" and the phrases "up to" and "on all the major sites". So I am not convinced.

Yes this.

So when you used the word "apparently" does that mean that you never saw it winning on major sites?

Correct. The developer just told us that.

Did they physically show up at the competition with a computer and the program, or were they a remote participant?

(assuming bots of this quality are rare) bit strange that they would show up at your doorstep, adding another vector for being detected instead of just keeping quiet making money. reminds me of reports in german forums ~1-2 years ago on a bot crushing about these stakes being reported to stars and disappearing. the "owners" did not happen to speak in the tongue of some rocky island near british mainland?

/gossip-mode

oh! easy point, rock-paper-scissor equilibrium is a mixed strategy, you are right . I see what my confusion was... I was considering the LP to calculate the best response, not the one to calculate the equilibrium, which has obviously a different solution space.

Best response to a given strategy should be a pure strategy, but there is no reason why it has to be an equilibrium. Pure strategy rock is a best response to the strategy r:1/3, p:1/3, s:1/3 (as any other one is) but it is not an equilibrium.

I have still a long way to to before being able to solve a decent game, but thanks for helping anyway.

I don't quite understand why you are linking exploitability to the question whether or not your bot would beat (top) human players, that was never my point.

It seems like most teams in the Computer Poker Competition follow the same approach to creating a NLHE HU bot: Find a good abstraction of the full game, find a strategy that is as close to equilibrium as possible within this abstraction, and finally map the strategy back onto the full game. The results of the competition can be interpreted as such that your bot (strategy) is beating all other strategies -- however, we have no measure of accessing how "good" or, loosely speaking, how close to GTO these strategies are in the first place. A lower bound of exploitabilty would give us some insight to this question and would also be a natural criterion to access the quality of your strategy.

From a different perspective, the article and some of your comments advertise that human players could learn a lot from looking at how the bot solves certain spots. But why would I as a human player spend time learning from a bot without knowing how good the bot is, or how much room for improvement there still is (especially when you are stating yourself that the strategy may look very differently when the algorithms fully converge)? Back in 2008, even though it seems clear that the -250mb/g bot was better than top human players at this time, I don't think it would've been the best strategy for anyone to learn from this bot, but rather wait until the bot applies a strategy that has a signifincatly reduced exploitatability, therefore giving the people trying to learn from it more confidence in the strategy.

It surely would be interesting to see human players playing vs the bot, but I think most of us are aware that at some point in time, NHLE HU bots will be better than most human players anyways, so there's no real point in proving that this is or isn't the case in 2014 already.

Again, I don't really understand why you are aksing me this question as this seems unrelated to me +1ing a request for a lower bound of (theoretical) exploitability of your strategy. I'll answer it anyway: Since you just told me that any signal of the bot's (average) river strategy is arbitrary and therfore uninformative, I wouldn't apply a strategy that is trying to maximally exploit leaks in the bot's strategy on the river. However, I would approach river spots with the best balanced strategy my human mind can come up with. If your bot is really "super unbalanced" in river spots, my strategy is very likely to exploit the bot's strategy by default, but not maximally.