Home / Poker News July 2008 / Artificial intelligence slowly getting the better of human poker players
Artificial intelligence slowly getting the better of human poker players
Posted by: James Carter. - Sun, 2008-07-20 04:53
With all the fuss caused by the WSOP, an apparently insignificant event which pales in comparison with the excitement of the Big Dance took place at about the same time the green felt battles were at their peak. The University of Alberta’s Polaris set out to exact revenge on a group of professional poker players for last year’s defeat, this time successfully. IJay Palansky, Matt Hawrilenko and Nick Grudzien were unable to repeat last year’s performance against a Polaris boasting improved artificial intelligence, sporting the ability to read different player styles and to adapt to them. The above named players - all of whom have earned over $1 million off poker over their careers – played 500-hand Limit Holdem matches against the computer in a duplicate poker format to exclude the luck factor. At the end of the day, the results were in and the situation was clear: Polaris had caught up and it avenged last year’s loss in style.
One of Polaris’ creators affirmed that it was theoretically possible for a computer to play prefect poker provided it had enough computing power, and to thus secure an edge over human opponents for good.
The exhibition highlighted the difference between computers playing perfect information games like chess an checkers, and the technical difficulties of making them play an incomplete information game like poker well.
The programmers behind Polaris didn’t omit to point it out though that the test and thus the results were only valid for Fixed Limit Holdem. They admitted they still had to make it work for NL Holdem which is a much steeper challenge.
Despite being overshadowed by the ongoing WSOP action, Polaris’ triumph might go down in history as a much more important event. Besides the fact that this was the first time artificial intelligence beat human players fair and square, the test also proved that poker bots which could attain Polaris’ level of performance were still quite a bit away from being made available to the general public. The poker industry can breathe a sigh of relief for now, although whether or not we will be faced with Polaris’ offspring at the virtual poker table is no longer a question of “if” but rather one of “when”.
