Game Theorists Crack Poker

scientificamerican.com ^

[BenLurkin]

That means that this particular variant of poker, called heads-up limit hold’em (HULHE), can be considered solved.

...

A few other popular games have been solved before. In particular, in 2007 a team from the same computer-science department at Alberta — including Neil Burch, a co-author of the latest study — cracked draughts, also known as checkers.

But poker is harder to solve than draughts. Chess and draughts are examples of perfect-information games, in which players have complete knowledge of all past events and of the present situation in a game. In poker, in contrast, there are some things a player does not know: most crucially, which cards the other player has been dealt. The class of games with imperfect information is especially interesting to economists and game theorists, because it includes practical problems such as finding optimal strategies for auctions and negotiations.

...

This procedure, known as counterfactual regret minimization, has been widely adopted in the Annual Computer Poker Competition, which has run since 2006. But Bowling and colleagues have improved it by allowing the algorithm to re-evaluate decisions considered to be poor in earlier training rounds.

The other crucial innovation was the handling of the vast amounts of information that need to be stored to develop and use the strategy, which is of the order of 262 terabytes. This volume of data demands disk storage, which is slow to access. The researchers figured out a data-compression method that reduces the volume to a more manageable 11 terabytes and which adds only 5% to the computation time from the use of disk storage.

[Usagi_yo]

That’s a terribly easy game, that’s why it’s not played anymore. 5/stud first card down, last 4 up. But you’re right, it’s a game of money played with cards. vs a game a cards played with money.

And I take exception to claiming to have beaten NLHE heads up. I doubt it could ever beat the top 2%.

And “counterfactual regret minimization” is the long name for a “Crazy Ivan”.

Now, get it working for PLO, NL 2-7 TDLB IMHO two of the hardest games to learn to play correctly — of the games that are occasionally spread.

[Barkeep99]

It does help to have the basic math, but screw 262TB. I watch the other players as much or more than the cards. Works for me.

[I want the USA back]

Computer programmers are really very smart. They encapsulate their intelligence in programs. When a computer “wins” a game, it’s actually the programmer who is winning, by delayed action, through a series of instructions that he/she wrote in the program.

[Chode]

or rationalization