Quote:
Isn't it immoral to publish something that has not much use to anyone but people who plan to use it for unethical things?
As people have noted, poker AI is a fascinating research subject and very fun hobby for many people. I presume someone who released a poker AI would be operating for that purpose within that community.
Quote:
I had assumed what you meant was that one possible consequences of releasing the bot to be widely deployed - killing the games - was a good thing.
I actually do think that killing the games would be a good thing but that's not required. It's enough that internet poker is utterly replacable and does not increase net happiness. Minimal consideration is to be expected to the perishment of such a thing when creating something for a purpose other than the perishment.
If we equated the cost of the perishment of poker with say the perishment of online chess, then I would say that releasing an open source AI is a nice thing to do while releasing an open source fully functional
bot which is compatible with all major sites would be a douchy thing to do.
Damn though, I'm starting to feel sympathetic towards the idea of bots killing the games now lol. Winning poker players obviously expectedly go about creating rationalisations as to why it's good that online poker exists, that it is "fun" for the fish and whatnot, but the truth is that the existence of internet poker most probably has a negative effect on net happiness and development of the society. While that might not be enough to make a ban valuable, acceleration of the inevitable process from within people's motivation seems like it might be a good thing. I'll have to think about this.