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What took you so long? I mean not the Pluribus team specifically, but Poker AI researchers in general. The desire to master this sort of game has inspired the
by n3k5 7y ago
What took you so long? I mean not the Pluribus team specifically, but Poker AI researchers in general.
The desire to master this sort of game has inspired the development of entire branches of mathematics. Computers are better at maths than humans. They're less prone to hazardous cognitive biases (gambler's fallacy etc.) and can put on an excellent poker face.
As a layperson who's rather ignorant about both no-limit Texas hold 'em and applicable AI techniques, my intuition would tell me that super-human hold 'em should have been achieved before super-human Go. Apparently your software requires way less CPU power than AlphaGo/AlphaZero, which seems to support my hypothesis. What am I missing?
Bonus questions in case you have the time and inclination to oblige:
What does this mean for people who like to play on-line Poker for real money?
Could you recommend some literature (white papers/books/lecture series/whatever) to someone interested in writing an AI (running on potato-grade hardware) for a niche "draft and pass" card game (e.g. Sushi Go!) as a recreational programming exercise?
- noambrown 7y agoI think it took the community a while to come up with the right algorithms. So much of early AI research was focused on beating humans at chess and later Go. But those techniques don't directly carry over to an imperfect-information game like poker. The challenge of hidden information was kind of neglected by the AI community. This line of research really has its origins in the game theory community actually (which is why the notation is completely different from reinforcement learning). Fortunately, these techniques now work really really well for poker. It's now quite inexpensive to make a superhuman poker bot.
- amelius 7y agoSo will this be the end of online poker?
- joaomacp 7y agoIt must be. It is way too hard to prevent humans from using an AI. Some chess services try to check if you're playing "too perfect", but in poker that's harder to do, and there's way more money on the line.
- chance_state 7y ago>Some chess services try to check if you're playing "too perfect" [...] That's interesting, could you share an example? Most of my search results are anecdotal Reddit threads about how many people cheat in online chess.
- MikeHolman 7y agoAll the major online chess websites have anti-cheat mechanisms. They don't publish details of how they detect cheaters though, and I don't know how good they are. From what I've read, they work by comparing the player's moves against chess engines, and if the player is picking engine's choice too often in positions where there are multiple roughly equal moves, they get flagged.
- meruru 7y agoI always found weird that someone would want to cheat in a game like online chess. I mean, what's the point? Does anyone have insight on what's going on in the head of cheaters?
- Jach 7y agoA few reasons come to mind. One is simply that if you have any metrics (ranking, win/loss ratio, greater site access..) it's going to feel nice to see them improve. Another is that losing at anything can be ego-hurting (similar reason good players sometimes sandbag with new accounts / lower ranks they can't possibly lose to, they need to 'win' more). Or reverse sandbagging/trolling with a bot might be amusing. Another is the cheater may justify it as a self-teaching game, and might not always play the strongest move but see if their move is even in consideration or try to improve ability to see the better moves by having them always pointed out -- but why not just play the bot, or save that for post-game analysis? I like to run my go games through gnugo's annotated analysis at the end (as I'm very weak I assume even the weak gnugo can teach me things), it'd be too troublesome to use it in a live game.
- ggggtez 7y agoNo, having losing odds never stopped anyone from gambling.
- olalonde 7y agoThat's simply not true... I don't play casino games because of the losing odds. I play poker because of the winning odds. I guess you meant "having losing odds doesn't stop everyone from gambling".
- traderjane 7y agoEven with a magical human test, you couldn't know whether it was human + robot performance.
- salty_biscuits 7y agoJust bet on bots playing each other.
- drjesusphd 7y agoSo... like Wall Street!
- tempestn 7y agoIt's pretty easy for good players to recognize other good players. And since the house takes such a large cut, the only way for pro players to have positive expected value online is to seek out games with poor players. So even if they couldn't recognize the bots as such, they would see them as tough players and avoid them. That said, I suppose it would be possible for the bots to become so prevalent that all this sort of opportunity is effectively used up, so the return vs time and risk for a human player is no longer worthwhile. (That already happened long ago for most players, as the initial online poker boom faded and most casual players left.) On the other hand, all the major platforms have terms prohibiting using bots, so their numbers might be sufficiently limited to prevent that scenario.
- oppiz 7y agoIt's my understanding the big sites have some pretty sophisticated bot detection systems, so in theory a bot that would be successful at beating online poker couldn't be a huge winner, it'd presumably raise too many red flags. However, if it were a near break-even player, with dozens, if not hundreds, of instances running at any given time, it's going to slowly grind out a substantial figure. You'd also have to take into account that the sites are monitoring things like reaction times to bets and raises, hand range consistency, etc. I'm not a coder, but it seems like it'd be a tremendous undertaking to code a bot that would be a substantial threat to players. Then again, maybe I'm naive about the level of scrutiny the poker sites are employing.
- oppiz 7y agoI guess the real threat isn't a "bot" but something in the way of a program that interprets the data on the screen real-time and whose output instructs the player of the "optimal" play, given the circumstances. How the hell would you deter that as a site operator?
- BigJono 7y agoPretty sure I've read a long time back on 2p2 that large consistant winners on certain sites have been asked to submit camera footage of their play with a clear view of screens and inputs. So this is probably something that companies like Pokerstars have been dealing with for years already.
- MRD85 7y agoI'm sitting here considering the possibility of making my own bot to play low stakes online poker ($1.50 sit n go). Run it on 6 tables at once and I imagine it would be facing really poor opponents and would have a steady flow of cash.
- moate 7y agountil your bot gets caught (possibly quickly) and then you're banned from the sites.
- kyleblarson 7y agoEven if it is, it means a new live poker boom which is a very good thing
- icelancer 7y ago>> Computers are better at maths than humans. OP discussed it but while this is true, it is not necessarily true or straightforward when it comes to games with hidden information like poker. This is more of a game theoretical problem (Economics) than it is a purely mathematical one, which had less support in the AI/ML community, hence the delay. The lower CPU/GPU/resource use supports that fact as does your intuition. Breaking poker required a lot of manual work and model design over brute force algorithms and reinforcement learning.