Market for PokerBot competitions?

[JSeligstein]

Hey all. I was reading articles on the PokerBot competition at the WSOP this year that had a 6-bot AI competition. I was wondering if there was a market for this. Does anyone out there think it would be interesting for poker bots to compete in an isolated environment that people could watch? Sure would be fun for us poker dorks out there. I have lots of ideas. Drop me a message if anyone is interested in talking or writing a general protocol.

[Sniper]

The Poker Acedmy guys from U of Alberta have been hosting bot play for quite some time.... http://games.cs.ualberta.ca/webgames/poker/bots.html

[Stephen Gray]

I think it's being done.

PS: How's the UT poker club working out?

[marvepo]

The game level demonstrated by the bots in WSOPR that have taken place in Las Vegas, was really good, the 6 bots had a level worthy of this competition, it was very touching to see how they played, even better than many humans.

[jukofyork]

If anybody is interested then quite a while ago I wrote something which allowed ANY bot capable of playing on the old UofA server to play inside of Poker Academy 1.5

It is basically a plug-in bot which emulates this protocol exactly. The plugin bot is called OPPBot, and all you have to do is set the port # u wish to fake the OofA server on, start this plugin bot, and then connect to this fake server using your old UofA bot.

This also has the added benefits:

(1) It <u>allows you to write plugin bots for Poker Academy in any language</u> so long as you use the protocol [Online Poker Protocol (v1.1)], rather than simply using the Java only Merkat-API [totally different protocol] which the makers of PPA provide for bot developers.
(2) Before PA 2.0 was released there was no way to <u>play against either remote players or remote bots</u> - Using OPPBot this was possible before PA 2.0 was released.

If you are interested then check out the original post on the PA forum here (http://www.poki-poker.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=580&amp;highlight=jukofyork&amp;sid=4a3bae 936be2247b61fe73c34b47bec1).

I basically got so little feedback, I never saw any reason to improve on the initial version. There are two known things which are not exactly emulated and because I followed the protocol exactly, you will notice that all-in situations are not handled (the old UofA servers allowed -ve bankrolls, but careful code in your bot can track stacks and avoid this), so I suggest you read the whole post before trying it /images/graemlins/smile.gif

If anybody is interested, then I am quite happy to take another look at OPPBot and I will take the time to tidy it up, clean the connection interface, possibly get it working with both 2.0 and 1.5 APIs (there is very little change in API, but I dont own PA 2.0 so am pretty stuck for testing... lol [maybe somebody here might care to test some alpha/beta code for me on their PA 2.0?]). Also feel 100% free to rip any of the code (all the Java source is also included inside the zipfile) and as always use at your own risk. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

PS: <u>Plz, plz, plz</u> don't ask me about why your UofA bot won't connect to OPPBot before you are 100% sure it will not connect to the REAL UofA servers!!! - I can only help fix OPPBot problems, not socket problems, or merkat problems - sry /images/graemlins/smile.gif

Juk /images/graemlins/smile.gif