Home / Poker News January 2015 / Has Heads-up Limit Holdem Really Been “Solved”?
Has Heads-up Limit Holdem Really Been “Solved”?
Posted by: Jo Martin - Sun, 2015-01-11 13:29
Can Texas Holdem be “solved” in the mathematical sense of the word? While there are several generations of poker and
online poker players out there who would swear that being the imperfect information game that it is, Holdem simply can’t be confined to a mathematical model, a team of scientists from the University of Alberta have just pulled off the impossible. A study published in Science on January 9 doesn’t just put the bold statement onto the table, it also provides proof in the form of the published research.
The computer program which apparently has the game figured out is called Cepheus and the team behind it is made up of Neil Burch, Michael Johanson, Michael Bowling and Oskari Tammelin. According to the abstract of the above said study, Cepheus does not guarantee winning every single hand – and that is indeed perfectly reasonable. What the program essentially does is that it looks at all the possible hands in every particular situation, and it comes up with the best course of action. Such an approach obviously guarantees though that Cepheus will always finish with a long-term profit, or – in the worst case – it will break even.
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How exactly did the researchers build the enormous database Cepheus uses to blow away its opposition? By letting the program play against itself. Cepheus is built to analyze every single decision point in the game close-up, looking at the possible outcomes of the said decision, and picking the absolute best one.
The most impressive thing about the program is that it constantly learns as it plays, so essentially, the more it plays, the better it becomes at the game.
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