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The remark wasn't meant to establish my credibility, I was just saying you make elementary mistakes. My hunch is you have no experience playing poker. This does

by gizmo 18y ago

The remark wasn't meant to establish my credibility, I was just saying you make elementary mistakes. My hunch is you have no experience playing poker. This doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but it doesn't exactly work in your advantage. Are you really saying that the computer doesn't need to use any psychology - and can become "world champion" just by playing a mathematically perfect game with some random bluffs thrown in? You've got to be kidding me. (Just for the record - I'm talking NL hold'em here. If you're talking about 5 card draw you have a point. As that game doesn't have the same opportunity for psychology)

aggieben 18y ago
Well, if it's any comfort, your hunch is correct. I'm not very experienced. My observation, perhaps incorrect, is that poker outcomes are almost entirely based on psychological manipulation, not on probabilities - because people can be psychologically manipulated. In this regard, poker is like Risk. There's an element of probability, but it only rarely tends to dominate outcomes (I am an experienced Risk player). It's possible to write Risk-playing software that is very difficult to beat except in the rarest of circumstances where luck dominates, because you can't convince the computer to invade Asia or fortify in Australia when it would really be against his interests. I see poker in the same way. Perhaps I'm over-trivializing the difficulty of writing such a system for poker, but I suppose in essence, I am indeed arguing that you could create software that could just ignore the psychological aspects of the game, and instead play a total numbers game, and that over time it should be a winner. I guess I can concede that if you don't ignore the psychological aspects and try to use them in formulating strategy, that would be very difficult indeed; I just don't see the point.
- gizmo 18y ago
  Thanks for explaining your argument. Let's suppose you're right - that playing by the numbers is sufficient. In this case you would not have to keep track of player histories, as you consider every hand without context. But this can only result in one thing: your play style will be constant. You will always take the best action with probability P and (semi)bluff with probability 1 - P. The human notices this and starts playing very aggressively. As a result the PC will fold winning hands and lose many blinds. What the PC should do is change tactics. Get aggressive or start laying traps (e.g. slowplay a great hand so it looks weak, to lure the aggressive human player into bluffing a lot of money). If the computer always plays optimally from hand to hand it cannot deduce changes in playing style and will therefore always lose. From this I can only conclude that psychological aspects can never be ignored in poker.
  - aggieben 18y ago
    I never really meant that the calculations should be without context. One could keep a "running distribution" to update P (probably a bunch of Ps, actually) as you play. Maybe we're now just looking at the same thing from different angles. You say "use psychology" and I say "use numbers", but in the end, maybe it's the same thing and it's harder than I'm giving it credit for. Thanks for the poker lesson, by the way. Next time I see a game I'll be more interested.
    - gizmo 18y ago
      Ah-hah. But that's the problem. So you need some kind of distribution for each of the different tactics the player plays. And then you need some heuristics to predict which tactic is going to follow which tactic. It's a slippery slope, I guess. I don't know where to draw the line myself. It can be argued that as soon as something is modeled by a computer it ceases to be psychology and becomes mundane math. But I do still believe that most tactics people use to trick others with need to show up in the code in some way. I won't use the "Clearly you've never done x" line again. It was cheap and uncalled for. Thanks for calling me out on that.
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      So psychology and math in poker are sort of two sides of the same coin. Generally, psychology means narrowing your opponent's range of possible holdings as much as possible, while preventing him from doing the same to you. You do this to enable yourself to make better math-based decisions, and cause him to make worse ones. If you can accurately pinpoint your opponent's range, and predict how he'd react with the hands in that range on future rounds, the game becomes a rather trivial math problem for a computer. It can simply enumerate all of the possibilities and determine the correct course of action. Unfortunately narrowing a person's range and predicting how they'd play in future rounds is very hard to do for a human, and presumably even harder for a computer.
  - dejb 18y ago
    Actually this is not correct. The perfect unbeatable game theoretical model actually doesn't take into consideration the history of the other player. There's maths and stuff by John Nash to prove this. The game theory perfect model will always play as if it is playing a perfect opponent. In way you could say that the mathematically perfect player is so on guard against tricks by an opponent that even after 20 consecutive raises by an opponent it still doesn't alter its strategy. Of course the strategy will not lose just because a player raises once and consequently it also won't lose to a player who raises all the time. However by doing this the algorithm will miss out on substantial chances to exploit an imperfect opponent's weaknesses (in this case being way too aggressive). As a poker pro there is a (small) chance this 'perfect' player wouldn't even beat the rake against fish. However it would not lose (on average) to the best player in the world (and would probably win). This might all seem to go against your intuition and experience as someone who is probably a really good poker player but it has been mathematically proven as part of game theory. Of course finding/creating this 'perfect' playing strategy is probably more complicated than 'solving' chess which most people believe to be impossible.

by gizmo 18y ago

aggieben 18y ago

Well, if it's any comfort, your hunch is correct. I'm not very experienced. My observation, perhaps incorrect, is that poker outcomes are almost entirely based on psychological manipulation, not on probabilities - because people can be psychologically manipulated. In this regard, poker is like Risk. There's an element of probability, but it only rarely tends to dominate outcomes (I am an experienced Risk player). It's possible to write Risk-playing software that is very difficult to beat except in the rarest of circumstances where luck dominates, because you can't convince the computer to invade Asia or fortify in Australia when it would really be against his interests. I see poker in the same way. Perhaps I'm over-trivializing the difficulty of writing such a system for poker, but I suppose in essence, I am indeed arguing that you could create software that could just ignore the psychological aspects of the game, and instead play a total numbers game, and that over time it should be a winner. I guess I can concede that if you don't ignore the psychological aspects and try to use them in formulating strategy, that would be very difficult indeed; I just don't see the point.

gizmo 18y ago
Thanks for explaining your argument. Let's suppose you're right - that playing by the numbers is sufficient. In this case you would not have to keep track of player histories, as you consider every hand without context. But this can only result in one thing: your play style will be constant. You will always take the best action with probability P and (semi)bluff with probability 1 - P. The human notices this and starts playing very aggressively. As a result the PC will fold winning hands and lose many blinds. What the PC should do is change tactics. Get aggressive or start laying traps (e.g. slowplay a great hand so it looks weak, to lure the aggressive human player into bluffing a lot of money). If the computer always plays optimally from hand to hand it cannot deduce changes in playing style and will therefore always lose. From this I can only conclude that psychological aspects can never be ignored in poker.
- aggieben 18y ago
  I never really meant that the calculations should be without context. One could keep a "running distribution" to update P (probably a bunch of Ps, actually) as you play. Maybe we're now just looking at the same thing from different angles. You say "use psychology" and I say "use numbers", but in the end, maybe it's the same thing and it's harder than I'm giving it credit for. Thanks for the poker lesson, by the way. Next time I see a game I'll be more interested.
  - gizmo 18y ago
    Ah-hah. But that's the problem. So you need some kind of distribution for each of the different tactics the player plays. And then you need some heuristics to predict which tactic is going to follow which tactic. It's a slippery slope, I guess. I don't know where to draw the line myself. It can be argued that as soon as something is modeled by a computer it ceases to be psychology and becomes mundane math. But I do still believe that most tactics people use to trick others with need to show up in the code in some way. I won't use the "Clearly you've never done x" line again. It was cheap and uncalled for. Thanks for calling me out on that.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    So psychology and math in poker are sort of two sides of the same coin. Generally, psychology means narrowing your opponent's range of possible holdings as much as possible, while preventing him from doing the same to you. You do this to enable yourself to make better math-based decisions, and cause him to make worse ones. If you can accurately pinpoint your opponent's range, and predict how he'd react with the hands in that range on future rounds, the game becomes a rather trivial math problem for a computer. It can simply enumerate all of the possibilities and determine the correct course of action. Unfortunately narrowing a person's range and predicting how they'd play in future rounds is very hard to do for a human, and presumably even harder for a computer.
- dejb 18y ago
  Actually this is not correct. The perfect unbeatable game theoretical model actually doesn't take into consideration the history of the other player. There's maths and stuff by John Nash to prove this. The game theory perfect model will always play as if it is playing a perfect opponent. In way you could say that the mathematically perfect player is so on guard against tricks by an opponent that even after 20 consecutive raises by an opponent it still doesn't alter its strategy. Of course the strategy will not lose just because a player raises once and consequently it also won't lose to a player who raises all the time. However by doing this the algorithm will miss out on substantial chances to exploit an imperfect opponent's weaknesses (in this case being way too aggressive). As a poker pro there is a (small) chance this 'perfect' player wouldn't even beat the rake against fish. However it would not lose (on average) to the best player in the world (and would probably win). This might all seem to go against your intuition and experience as someone who is probably a really good poker player but it has been mathematically proven as part of game theory. Of course finding/creating this 'perfect' playing strategy is probably more complicated than 'solving' chess which most people believe to be impossible.